Ancestry with the (US) National Archives are making it easier to explore their family history by providing free access to search 50 million and images on Ancestry,  Ancestry’s usually free online tutorials video courses are all available.  Exploring the records is completely free – just create an account by entering your email to start your search. The almost half a billion digitized and searchable records being made available to all for free are comprised of nearly 300 different collections, including ship passenger and crew lists, naturalization and citizenship records, immigration records, and key military collections such as WWI and WWII draft cards.  A sampling of the collections include:

• WWI and WWII U.S. Draft Cards
• New York, Passenger and Crew Lists, 1820-1957
• California, Federal Naturalization Records, 1843-1999
• U.S. Passport Applications, 1795-1925
• U.S. Compiled Revolutionary War Military Service Records, 1775-1783
• U.S., Confederate Soldiers Compiled Service Records, 1861-1865
• U.S., Border Crossings from Canada to U.S., 1895-1960

Ancestry’s Academy™, a free program offering online courses to help families get started on their family tree building. A library of educational videos can be found at: www.ancestry.com/academy.

Ancestry also has AncestryK12programs for K-12 schools and teachers in classrooms nationwide with content from the U.S. collection of Ancestry, Fold3.com and Newspapers.com. With school closures in effect across the U.S., Ancestry is offering support to parents by making its AncestryK12 lesson plans available for free for anyone to download while they are educating children at home. 

The lesson plans that Ancestry has created target a number of core subjects, with educational topics ranging from the American Revolutionary War to the 1940 U.S. Federal Census. They have been written by teachers according to the History Standards administered by the National Center for History in the Schools at the University of California, Los Angeles under the guidance of the National Council for History Standards. Available lesson plans can be accessed below: 

• 1940 Census Lesson
• The Census and the Constitution
• The Census and the Depression
• Autobiography
• Biography
• Immigration Over Time
• Civil War
• Military Lesson (Civil War)
• Personal Side of War (American Revolutionary War)
• War of 1812 – Privateers
• Mobilization for War (WWI)
• Battles (WWII)
• Local History is Your Community History
• Historical Crime
• Haunted House
• Suffrage Movement
• How Life Influences Art
• African American Congressmen Lesson
• Trail of Tears Lesson

To read more see: https://tinyurl.com/tody6qr

Original url:

https://blogs.ancestry.com/ancestry/2020/03/24/free-at-home-education-resources-from-ancestry-and-access-to-nearly-500m-national-archives-records/

I have no affiliation with Ancestry and am posting this solely for the information of the reader.

Jan Meisels Allen

Chairperson, IAJGS Public Records Access Monitoring Committee