Ancestry is Committed to Preserving Memory of the Holocaust
Ancestry announced that they have long been committed to preserving at-risk history and culturally important collections. They offer over 1,000 collections available at no cost to the public that span a wide variety of geographies, cultures and communities, including those specific to enslaved individuals, the internment of Japanese Americans and more than 200 related specifically to the Holocaust.
In order to do this, Ancestry has partnered with several organizations over the years. This began in 2008 when Ancestry made the commitment to make all documents and indexes available on Ancestry related to the Holocaust available for free to anyone. Since then, Ancestry has invested more than $3 million to digitize records associated directly with the Holocaust and have partnered with several Jewish organizations including JewishGen, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Arolsen Archives, and now USC Shoah Foundation.
Ancestry is proud to announce that in partnership with Arolsen Archives, Ancestry has completed their digitized, searchable collection of more than 19 million Holocaust and Nazi persecution-related records.
Ancestry is humbled and honored to announce their new partnership with USC Shoah Foundation to publish an index to nearly 50,000 Jewish Holocaust survivor testimonies that contain information on more than 600,000 additional relatives and other individuals found in survivor questionnaires.
Both of those collections will be available for free, in perpetuity, for everyone at ancestry.com/alwaysremember.
Fewer than 400,000 Holocaust survivors are still alive, and by 2030, there could be fewer than 100,000. Ancestry points out that we are at a critical time, where the impact and memory of the Holocaust is in danger of being lost. Recent research shows that 66 percent of millennials have no knowledge of what Auschwitz was.
This is why Ancestry is working to preserve those memories. Learning the stories of our ancestors gives us a greater understanding of ourselves and a sense of connection to the past, making us more open and resilient.
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Ancestry Unveils Two Unique Holocaust Records Collections
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