This is really cool!

Web site releases more than 90 million names from war records, including 2,000 who died in Iraq

For every generation in this country there has been a war. And with wars come millions of records that can shed light on family history, detailing everything from the color of soldiers’ eyes to what their neighbors may have said about them.

On Thursday, Ancestry.com unveiled more than 90 million U.S. war records from the first English settlement at Jamestown in 1607 through the Vietnam War’s end in 1975. The collection includes the names and gravestone details of 3.5 million deceased U.S. soldiers, including 2,000 who died in Iraq.

“The history of our families is intertwined with the history of our country,” said Tim Sullivan, chief executive of Ancestry.com.

The records, which can be accessed free until the anniversary of D-Day on June 6, came from the National Archives and Records Administration and include 37 million images, draft registration cards from both world wars, military yearbooks, prisoner-of-war records from four wars, unit rosters from the Marine Corps from 1893 through 1958, and Civil War pension records, among others.

Ancestry.com spent $3 million to digitize the military records. It took nearly a year, including some 1,500 handwriting specialists racking up 270,000 hours, to review the oldest records.

The 10-year-old Provo, Utah-based company doesn’t have every U.S. military record. Over the past four centuries, some have been lost or destroyed. Some records remain classified.

However, this is the first time a for-profit Web site is featuring this many military records

Budget constraints and a long list of unfinished priorities have limited federal efforts to make roughly 9 billion public documents available online, said National Archives spokeswoman Susan Cooper.

Go to Ancestry.com

Technorati Tags: Military History, War records, US, ancestors