WASHINGTON, D.C./PROVO, Utah – The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Ancestry.com have announced that material from four Museum collections containing information on more than 30,000 victims of Nazi persecution is now available online at Ancestry.com and can be searched at no cost.  The collections contain information on thousands of individuals including displaced Jewish orphans; Czech Jews deported to the Terezin concentration camp and camps in occupied Poland; and French victims of Nazi persecution.
The collections are being made available through the World Memory Project, launched in May 2011. The project is recruiting the public to help build the world’s largest online resource on Jewish victims of the Holocaust and millions of non-Jews who were targeted for persecution by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, allowing victims’ families and survivors themselves to discover missing chapters of their history, learn the truth about the fate of their relatives and honor those who were lost.
World Memory Project contributors are continuously keying information that will form new searchable databases of historical collections when complete.  To date, more than 2,100 contributors from around the world have indexed more than 700,000 records.  Anyone, anywhere can contribute to the project by simply typing information from historical records into the online database.
The World Memory Project utilizes proprietary software and project management donated by Ancestry.com, which hosts its own online archival project to transcribe historical records.  Once Museum records are transcribed, the indices are hosted exclusively on Ancestry.com and are permanently free to search.  The Museum provides copies of documents upon request at no cost.  The original documentation remains in the Museum’s archival collection.
To find out more about the World Memory Project or to learn how to become a contributor, visit www.WorldMemoryProject.org.