Industry News-Gale Adds to AncestryPlus

Gale and its partner MyFamily.com Inc., announced it will add digitized images of World War I draft registration cards to the information available in AncestryPlus. According to Gale, the digitization project "captures and indexes front and back images of all 24 million WWI draft registration cards. Approximately 100,000 cards are already scanned, with additional cards coming in weekly updates. Upon completion, the collection will be fully searchable by name, state, county, and birth date, with search results linking directly to images."

Draft registration cards were completed during 1917–18 by approximately 25 percent of the total U.S. population; only a small percentage of those who registered were actually called up for service. The cards capture a wealth of personal details, which makes them an extremely rich resource for genealogists. The cards include such items as full name, age, home address, citizenship status, birthplace, occupation, marital status and number of children under age 12, height, build, eye color, hair color, physical impairments or disabilities, and any reason to claim exemption from the draft. The addition of the draft cards comes on the heels of the inclusion in AncestryPlus of the UK/Ireland Collection and 1930 Census Data. AncestryPlus combines Ancestry.com's records of more than 1.7 billion names, along with information on how to begin family research.