From Military.com:
“Ancestry Website to Catalogue
Names of Japanese Americans Incarcerated During World War II”
The names of thousands of people
held in Japanese American incarceration camps during World War II will be
digitized and made available for free, genealogy company Ancestry announced
Wednesday. The website, known as one of the largest global online resources of
family history, is collaborating with the Irei Project, which has been working
to memorialize more than 125,000 detainees. It's an ideal partnership as the
project's researchers were already utilizing Ancestry. Some of the site's
collections include nearly 350,000 records. People will be able to look at more
than just names and tell “a bigger story of a person,” said Duncan Ryūken
Williams, the Irei Project director. "Being able to research and
contextualize a person who has a longer view of family history and community
history, and ultimately, American history, that's what it's about — this
collaboration,” Williams told told The Associated Press exclusively.
In response to the 1941 attack by
Japan on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order
9066 on Feb. 19, 1942, to allow for the incarceration of people of Japanese
ancestry. The thousands of citizens — two-thirds of whom were Americans — were
unjustly forced to leave their homes and relocate to camps with barracks and
barbed wire. Some detainees went on to enlist in the U.S. military. Through
Ancestry, people will be able to tap into scanned documents from that era such
as military draft cards, photographs from WWII and 1940s and ’50s Census
records. Most of them will be accessible outside of a paywall. Williams, a
religion professor at the University of Southern California and a Buddhist
priest, says Ancestry will have names that have been assiduously spell-checked.
Irei Project researchers went to great efforts to verify names that were
mangled on government camp rosters and other documents. “So, our project, we
say it's a project of remembrance as well as a project of repair,” Williams
said. “We try to correct the historical record.”
The Irei Project debuted a
massive book at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles that
contains a list of verified names the week of Feb. 19, which is a Day of
Remembrance for the Japanese American Community. The book, called the Ireichō,
will be on display until Dec. 1. The project also launched its own website with
the names as well as light installations at old camp sites and the museum.
^ This sounds very interesting
and I can’t wait to check it out. ^
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.