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OldMagazineArticles.com, which is a site for (you guessed it) old magazine articles, has added a new magazine to its content. Yank Magazine (1942-1945) has been added to the archives along with other articles that were published between 1860-1922.

From the front page of the site (and that page background is causing my eyeballs much pain — ow) you can search, browse by subject (listed on the front page), or look at
recently-added articles. (When I looked at the recently-added articles they were from a 1919 Stars and Stripes.)

Down at the bottom of the page you’ll see a list of magazines. The URL for Yank is http://www.oldmagazinearticles.com/articles.php?cid=94 . Here you’ll get several pages of article titles, summaries, and keywords (and sometimes wry editorial comments.) Sometimes there’s also some historical context. You will not get the full article, however; to do that click on the title and you’ll get a PDF file, scanned in from the magazine itself (complete with pictures, well-scanned, very readable.)

(Read the article on teenage slang in the 40s. The more things change.)

On the upper right part of the article summary pages you’ll see an RSS icon; looks like you can get RSS feeds for each category of information, though I didn’t see one for Yank specifically (though there was one for WWII.) There were lots of fascinating articles here; using “Hide Background Images” in Firefox made browsing a lot more fun…

Baylor University has announced that a small archive of Civil War letters has been digitized and is now available at the Baylor University Library Digital Collections site. The collection consists of thirty-two letters, mostly between a soldier and his sweetheart.

The letters have been both digitized and transcribed; from the front page of the collection you can browse the letters in chronological order. The next-to-last item is the burial receipt for John Coleman, who wrote most of the letters (he died in 1880) and the last item — a really nice touch — is a chronological transcription of all the letters, presented in a PDF file.

Click on a letter and you’ll get a good-sized picture; a lot of them are tough to read however (especially the ones written on blue paper.) On the left nav you’ll have the option to view the document description (the letter itself), the page description, or the page and text. Choose the page and text option; you’ll get a good copy of the letter to browse but also a transcription in a popup window. The transcriptions aren’t perfect, but they’re very good.

John Coleman is an interesting man. Melancholy, frustrated, worried about his girlfriend and family, occasionally bored, he mixes home and war news equally. His girlfriend writes back patiently, their letters often missing each other. The good transcriptions and the focus on two people make this a fascinating read. Well done Baylor.

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Dang, I wish I had covered this earlier. Ancestry.com has announced the U.S. Military Collection, which includes draft registration cards, POW records from several wars (including the War of 1812, the Civil War, and WWII), service records from the Revolutionary War, War of 1912, and the Civil War, and newsreels from WWII.

And as I mentioned access is free through June 6. The collection’s available at http://www.ancestry.com/military . Note you will have to have an account to access the materials (but accounts are free).

You can search by name, date of birth or death, war, and any keywords you can think of. (Since there is no option to search by state I found myself using state names for additional keywords.)

I had mixed results with this search. I tried a couple of relatives with very obvious names and got pretty good results. But when I tried to search for relatives with more common names, I quickly got frustrated — even narrowing down to one conflict, using keywords, etc, got a frustrating level of results. Ancestry.com gives the results a star ranking for how closely their results match your search — one to five stars. You have the option of filtering out results that match less than four stars, less than five stars, etc. DON’T DO IT. I had one search where the exact match I was looking for — the right guy, the first result — came up as a three star match and not five stars. I have no idea why.

Let’s assume you’re successful and you’ve found some service members for whom you’d like information. You can view the basic information immediately but to view all of it you’ll have to use Ancestry’s viewer. Ancestry has a basic viewer you can use but they’ll want you to use the advanced viewer. The advanced viewer allows you more viewing options (zooming etc.) but it’s not strictly necessary — the basic viewer works fine.

Information provided by the cards, rolls, etc varies depending on what they are. Most of them offer some kind of physical description as well as indication of occupation. All the ones I looked at were very readable, even with the basic viewer.

After spending a lot of time frustrated and trying to find people, I took a break and browsed through the collection of newsreels. You can search the reels by keyword or browse them by year. Each listed reel has a summary associated with it; you can also choose to view the entire thing as embedded video. WARNING: these newsreels have WAR FOOTAGE. Graphic and violent images abound.

Ancestry has indeed come up with a massive collection of information, and if you have any interest in genealogy at all I urge you to take advantage of the last couple of days of free access. You might need that long — the name search can be very very frustrating.

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