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I thought you’d be interested in this Veterans Day story - A catastrophic fire in 1973 at the National Personnel Records Center outside St. Louis destroyed 80% of the records of U.S. Army personnel discharged November 1912 to January 1960 and 75% of U.S. Air Force personnel discharged September 1947 to January 1964. None of these records - about 80-100 pages of info per soldier on average – had duplicate copies. Records about the battles these brave soldiers fought in, the ships they sailed on, the medals they received, etc. were lost.
Ancestry hopes to recover those lost accounts. We are launching a special project asking people to interview and share stories from WWII military vets. Ancestry will take the submitted interviews and turn them into a searchable database to help supplement the lost WWII records for these soldiers.
Less than 600,000 of the 16 million American veterans who served in WWII are alive today. It’s predicted that 50% of remaining WWII Vets will be gone in 3 years and 90% will be gone in 10 years, so the time to preserve their histories is now. For more information on the project or to contribute a story, please visit: https://www.ancestry.com/veterans
For Veteran’s Day, Ancestry will also be giving 50% off all Ancestry subscriptions so everyone can learn about the heroes in their own family histories. This promotion will run on November 11th for Veteran’s Day only.
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The URL for this post is: http://www.geneamusings.com/2017/11/ancestrycom-to-recover-veterans-stories.html
Copyright (c) 2017, Randall J. Seaver
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2 comments:
And I just renewed my subscription last week. Mmmmm....how can I work it to save more money.
On the other hand, I am thrilled that they are encouraging stories from our rapidly disappearing WWII veterans. We need to preserve their stories.
It is a little late to be interviewing WWII vets. My dad had a lot of stories but he passed in 2004. I imagine more vets have departed than are still living.
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