The world’s online resource for family history Ancestry.com is commemorating the 200th birthday of President Abraham Lincoln with the addition of five new databases to its Civil War Collection.
This historically significant collection includes unique content such as photographs, handwritten letters, slave manifests and pension applications, and spans the days of slavery to the Civil War and through Reconstruction. The new databases will make millions of important Civil War era records easily searchable alongside other records already available at Ancestry.com, creating the largest online collection of Civil War documents, containing more than 12 million names.
Among the five new databases, The Abraham Lincoln Papers is an incredible collection of more than 20,000 documents – most from the 1850s through Lincoln’s presidential years – which include drafts of speeches and the Emancipation Proclamation, incoming and outgoing correspondence and notes, and printed material. The Abraham Lincoln Papers Collection will be searchable for free on Ancestry.com.
The Civil War Collection is part of Ancestry.com’s U.S. Military Collection, which includes more than 100 million names from the 1600s through Vietnam. The five new Civil War era databases now available on Ancestry.com include:
• Abraham Lincoln Papers (from the Library of Congress) – a collection of more than 20,000 letters written to and from President Lincoln, as well as drafts of speeches.
• New Orleans Slave Manifests, 1807-1860 – includes images of ship manifests transporting more than 30,000 slaves en route to New Orleans from the upper Southern states.
• Confederate Pension Applications from Georgia – more than 60,000 records documenting pension applications filed in Georgia from Confederate soldiers and their widows.
• Confederate Applications for Presidential Pardons – a collection containing more than 15,000 records of former Confederate soldiers and government officials requesting Presidential pardons.
• U.S. Civil War Soldier Records and Profiles – contains more than 4.2 million records and profiles about nearly every officer and soldier who fought in the Civil War.
Originally posted on February 6, 2009 @ 11:14 am