Nearly five years after the launch of the World Memory Project, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and Ancestry.com announce that records of one million people persecuted by the Nazis are now available to be searched.
Launched in May 2011, the World Memory Project is helping to build the world’s largest online resource for information about the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust and the millions of others persecuted by the Nazis.
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“The Nazis tried to erase these people from history. Today, this achievement helps restore their identities for posterity and honor those who were lost, ” says Neal Guthrie, director of the Museum’s Holocaust Survivors and Victims Resource Center. “We are thrilled to mark this important milestone of the World Memory Project, whose goal is to index as many historical records from the Museum’s archive containing details about individual Holocaust survivors and victims as possible.”
Among the collections in the Museum’s archive are names of Jewish orphans; lists of Czech Jews deported to the Terezin concentration camp and camps in occupied Poland; applications for Jews to receive special ID cards; ghetto register books and ghetto worker ID cards; and records relating to the Kindertransport. Anyone, anywhere can contribute to the project by simply typing information from historical records into the online database, one record at a time.
“One million names made searchable by some 3, 500 remarkable people around the world means families of victims and survivors have a better chance of finding out what really happened to their loved ones during the Holocaust, ” Guthrie adds.
Facts and figures:
In 2015, project contributors spent 9, 806 hours indexing and arbitrating 400, 497 name entries, which helped make 248, 862 new names searchable online free of charge at both Ancestry.com and the Museum’s Holocaust Survivors and Victims Database
Contributors to the project come from 18 different countries, including the United States, Bangladesh, Japan, Romania, and Zambia
Last year, three high schools — the Frisch School in Paramus, NJ; the Charles E. Smith Day School in Rockville, MD.; and Teaneck High School in Teaneck, NJ — fully indexed 6, 876 worker ID cards from the Lodz ghetto.
