Wednesday, June 17, 2009

NARA Databases at Ancestry.com

One of the latest collections listed on the Genealogy Databases Posted or Updated Recently at Ancestry.com is the NARA Collections on Ancestry.com list. There are 366 items on this list, which is ordered alphabetically by NARA Series Number. This is a Free Index for all researchers to access (just the list, not the databases themselves).

The site says:

"This database is a catalog to NARA collections published on Ancestry.com. It allows you to easily find what NARA collections are available on Ancestry. You can search the database by typing in a NARA microfilm series number (ex. A1154 or M158), or by typing in all or part of a NARA collection title or Ancestry.com database title."

Researchers should have noted the NARA Series Number when they have used records at the National Archives, or at the Family History Library or some other repository. Now we can use this list to see if there are records available on Ancestry.com that we have not seen before, or perhaps we can now capture an image of a record that we abstracted or transcribed in the repository.

It's easy to use your browser's Edit > Find combination to locate specific words or years. For example, doing an Edit > Find for 1890 provided M123 for the 1890 Census Veterans Schedule and M407 for the 1890 Census Population Schedule fragments.

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