Thursday, May 24, 2007

Free Access to Ancestry's Military Records

I just learned about this last night from an e-mail. Ancestry is making its military records available to look at for free online until June 6. Obviously, this is a wonderful opportunity for those who don't have an ancestry subscription to see if they can find military records on their ancestors.

You can find out more about the database on Ancestry's blog: http://blogs.ancestry.com/circle/?p=1436

My only problem with the database is that Ancestry has completely forgotten about the Mexican-American War, which was fought between 1846 and 1848. I realize this might be a petty complaint, but the war had an impact on U.S. history. The U.S. acquired the territory of present day California, and most of Arizonia and New Mexico as a result of this war.

I realize that not everyone is a student of history, but when it comes to posting a database on military records, there should be some acknowledgement that the U.S. fought a war against Mexico. My point is: if ancestry is going to post information on every major war that the U.S. has been involved in, they should make as much effort to ensure that they have posted information on all of the wars as they do creating the presentations about their databases. Ancestry has a nice presentation on their military database, but with all of the effort and time that was spent on creating that presentation, it does not appear as impressive when someone knows that one of the wars has been left out. To those who know that there was another war between the War of 1812 and the Civil War, it appears that Ancestry did not spend enough time researching or did not spend enough time on the project at all.

If someone is going to post an impressive presentation on military records online, that person needs to spend the time to ensure that he or she has all of the facts; otherwise, that person's presentation does not appear impressive.

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