ResearchBuzz

The National Archives of the United States have announced an agreement with Footnote to digitize selected documents from the National Archives. There are already 4.5 million pages available for a fee, but let’s look at some of the documents that will be digitized under the plan:

** Papers of the Continental Congress, 1774-1789 — Including Journals of the Congress, correspondence, drafts of treaties, and papers related to Indian Treaties.

** Mathew B Brady Collection of Civil War Photographs — 6,000 glass plate negatives acquired by the War Department from Brady in 1874-1876. This includes work from other photographers, and includes images of famous people as well as shots of battlefields, landscapes, camps, hospitals, etc.

** Name Index to Civil War and Later Pension Files — Pension applications for service in the US Army between 1861 and 1900. There are over 3 million index entries that cover applications for soldiers and sailors as well as their widows.

Now, the good news is that these materials will be digitized fairly soon. By February 6, the announcement said, the digitized materials will be available at no charge in National Archives research rooms in Washington DC and regional facilities around the country. The bad news is that the digitized documents will not be available at no charge through the National Archives Web site until five years have elapsed.

Feh!

Back to what’s available now. Footnote has a variety of materials already available at http://www.footnote.com/nara.php . You can browse through the material by subject or do a general search or search within categories. However, viewing the material here is not free. It’s $9.99 a month, $99.99 a year, or you can view individual records for $1.99.

You can read more about NARA’s teamup with Footnote at http://www.archives.gov/press/press-releases/2007/nr07-41.html .

The National Archives of Britain has released a new set of passenger manifests which cover British ports from 1890 to 1899 (with more lists to be added later — eventually the site will cover up to 1960.) You can search through the lists (and sign up for e-mail updates as more materials are added) at http://www.ancestorsonboard.com/ .

Search by first and last name, gender, origin or destination port. I did a search for Thomas Murphy. I got 55 results initially, though if I’d done a search for all name variants I would have gotten plenty more results. Search results are shown in a table that includes year of departure as well as destination and departure port.

That information is free. However if you want to view a transcript of the information or an image of the manifest itself, you’ll have to pay. Views/transcripts are purchased with “units”; 5 units to view a transcript and 30 units to view high-resolution color images of the manifests. This sounds like quite a bit until you see that you can buy 50 units for £5. If you purchase units here they’re also work on FindMyPast.com which also has similar genealogy/historical records.

More news and updates about the site at http://www.ancestorsonboard.com/getBlogContent.action .

Ancestry.com announced today that due to overwhelming response to their recent release of their passenger list collection (which I covered on November 12), free access to the collection would be extended through the end of 2006. So go look up those relatives now…