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Fold3 Site Update

November 6, 2012 by | 1 Comment

UPDATE 3 3:40 pm eastern:  Thank you for your patience. The site is now working. We apologize for the inconvenience.

UPDATE 3 1:35 pm eastern:  Our current estimated time for the site to be functioning is now around 3 pm eastern.

UPDATE 2 10:30 am eastern: Due to unforeseen issues the site is down and we expect it to be down for the next couple of hours. Thanks for your patience.

UPDATE: 9:00 am eastern: Fold3.com is up and running. We will need to do further updates later but for now enjoy the site. Let us know if you find anything out of the ordinary.

Our efforts to update the site this morning are taking a little longer than we initially planned. We know there is no convenient time to have the site down and we apologize for any trouble this causes. We hope to have the site up and running soon. Thank you for your patience.

Fold3 Surpasses 100 Million Images

October 17, 2012 by | 5 Comments

100 Million images

Earlier this month, we reached a major milestone when the counter on the Fold3 home page spun to and exceeded 100,000,000 record images. Our digital partners—the National Archives (NARA), Allen County Public Library, FamilySearch, and others—helped Fold3 attain this significant event. We thank them and you, our members and fans, for your support and enthusiasm over the last six years

In January 2007, Footnote.com (Fold3’s predecessor) launched with an initial 4 million images. Many of the Fold3 Team members have been around since those early days, watching the titles roll and the images multiply at an increasingly steady pace, assuring that our visitors can access an impressive range of original military records online.

Example War of 1812 Pension

The first sets of documents on the site proved very popular and continue to be some of Fold3’s biggest hits today. They include:

Since those early days, Fold3 has added many more popular titles, including:

Here we are, one hundred million images strong, looking eagerly toward the next hundred million. At the pace our team is digitizing and scanning, it will certainly happen sooner than we think. You can catch up on all of Fold3’s significant achievements here on the Fold3 HQ Blog.

WWII Draft Registration Cards – North Carolina

September 18, 2012 by | 1 Comment

On Wednesday, October 16, 1940, 25-year-old Beuford Astor Bost stood in line at his local draft board in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, to register for the first peace-time draft in U.S. history. He was one of over 16 million men throughout the country to do so that day. Bost was 5’ 8” tall, 152 pounds, with blue eyes, brown hair, and a light complexion. He worked at a soda shop located at 831 North Tyron Street in Charlotte. His mother, Ethel Lee Bost, lived in Concord, NC.

We know this information—and more—from a draft registration card signed by Bost. It’s one of over a million recently added images in Fold3’s newest collection of WWII Draft Registration Cards. By the end of the war, there were five more registrations, including the “Old Man’s Draft” Registration (also on Fold3), plus an “Extra Registration” for American men living abroad.

A Second Registration was taken on July 1, 1941—still prior to U.S. involvement in the war—for men who had reached the age of 21 since the first registration, less than nine months earlier. Clifton Ferris Edgerton was born in 1920 and turned 21 on June 11. He was a free-lance writer, living in New York City. He registered at a draft board in Duplin County, NC, and provided similar information, adding that he had a scar on his forehead. What his registration card doesn’t tell us is that he’s buried in the Henri-Chapelle American Cemetery and Memorial in Belgium. He died on September 19, 1944. He was a sergeant with the 87th Armored Field Artillery Battalion.

The Fold3 description for World War II Draft Registration Cards provides more details about the various registrations and more images and stories. Currently, draft registration cards from North Carolina are the first to become available on Fold3.

Start searching the WWII Draft Registration Cards.

Civil War Photos

September 4, 2012 by | 3 Comments

Recently I have been going through the several thousand new Civil War Photos that have been added to the Fold3 site. I actually have no ancestors who served in that great conflict, but I still find the photos fascinating, and I envy those whose ancestors are depicted in the several thousand indexed people-photos in the collection.

However, this collection includes more than just photos of people. My favorites are of buildings (being an architecture buff), and it has been fun to cull them out and then research whether or not the buildings still stand today. Many, of course, have fallen prey to the ravages of that war, or to the time that has passed since it ended. Some have pleasantly endured.

Some of the enduring buildings are famous, such as our nation’s Capitol and Ford’s Theater. Others are not quite so famous, with a sampling below.

President’s Box at Ford’s Theater (Fold3 image):

Petersburg Virginia Courthouse (Fold3 image):

Gate to Evergreen Cemetery, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania (Fold3 image):

General Robert E. Lee’s Richmond Residence (Fold3 image; no public domain modern image available, but Google 707 East Franklin Street, Richmond, Virginia, and check out the modern “street view”):

My favorite building so far, however, is one I am reasonably certain has not survived the nearly century and a half since its construction. It is a log church constructed by the 50th New York Engineers in Petersburg, Virginia. Care and creativity show in every part of it. The branches used to create the “window panes”, the detailing on the base of the spire, even the little cap on the post at the front-left of the image suggest the engineers in the 50th had a lot of fun designing and building this church, fun that was probably hard to come by in the midst of that decimating conflict.

Modern images from Wikimedia Commons.

All other photos from the Fold3.com Civil War Photos collection.

Presidential Discoveries

August 24, 2012 by | Comments Off

As we head into the presidential election season—officially launched by two conventions within the next few weeks—we’d like to highlight some Fold3 presidential discoveries.

Presidential Conventions

This year, the Republican National Convention takes place August 27-30 in Tampa Bay. The 2012 Democratic National Convention is September 3-6 in Charlotte. Neither convention will resemble the experiences of delegates at most of the earlier conventions. The first Republican Convention was in Philadelphia in 1856, while the Democrats met first in Baltimore in 1831.

Taft and Roosevelt vie for front-page headlines in a 1912 edition of the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette. President Taft was nominated by “Standpatters” at the Republican Convention in Chicago, while Teddy Roosevelt’s supporters started a new party in order to nominate him. In Fold3′s FBI Case Files, there are many references to political alliances. One case file discusses an editorial in Denver’s Pueblo Chieftain newspaper about “why Col. Roosevelt should not be nominated at the Chicago Republican Convention.”

A 1948 photo of Harry S. Truman with his family and VP candidate Alben W. Barkley is identified as taken ” … after their nomination at the Democratic Party’s national convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.”

Presidential Pasts

Calvin Coolidge
A great deal of presidential material, as well as photo collections for Coolidge, FDR, Eisenhower, and Truman, can be found on Fold3. Documents for presidents also appear in unexpected places like the Civil War and Later Veterans Pensions Index. Cards were created for twelve presidents in their roles as Commanders in Chief, from George Washington to Woodrow Wilson. Ulysses S. Grant, James A. Garfield, and William McKinley served in the Civil War.

Perhaps most unexpected is Lyndon Johnson’s original 1908 birth certificate in which he was given no first name. The record was amended, however, in 1961 just after he was inaugurated as vice president of the United States. It’s just another of the many interesting discoveries relating to U.S. presidents on Fold3.

World War II Kissing Couples

August 15, 2012 by | Comments Off

Times Square banner made of over 3000 tiles of 836 World War II couples.

Sam, a few decades my senior, was a personal friend. Sam was (and is) admired by hundreds and hundreds of people who knew him through his work in journalism at Oregon State University, his neighbors within the city of Corvallis, Oregon, and among those who were in his church community.

In the years I knew Sam he walked very slowly and with a painful limp, and it was my privilege for a period of time to pick him up each Sunday morning, drive him to church, and then slowly walk in with him so he made it safely to his pew. Sam was blind for the last several years of his life, but throughout that time he saw life more brightly and clearly than most I know.

Doris is Sam’s widow. Doris, the quintessentially cute grandmother and great-grandmother (I see her blushing as she reads that), is deeply into her eighties yet swims several miles each week, reads her Church magazine in French, practices the organ (when absolutely no one is around to hear her), and plays tennis on her Wii.

Sam served in the Army during World War II. He and Doris met before the war, but were married during one of Sam’s leaves. After their marriage, they travelled by train to Boston where Sam left for England and ultimately France, arriving there seventeen days after D-Day.

Sam and Doris are like so many we know. One or both of them served in World War II, either on the war front or the home front, and were married just before, during, or shortly after the war. They were young, impossibly courageous, and hopelessly in love. To quote Doris, “We thought we could lick the world together.”

August 14, was V-J Day. The Spirit of ’45 (www.spiritof45.org), an organization dedicated to honoring the spirit of those who worked and fought to win World War II, along with Hewlett-Packard, Ancestry.com, and our own Fold3, put together an eight-foot by twelve-foot banner honoring all those couples who sacrificed so much.

Couples like Sam and Doris.

Take a look at the information about the banner on Fold3.com (Times Square Kiss) and then click the link to view the full image and marvel at these young couples.

Confidential Correspondence of the Navy, 1919-1927

August 8, 2012 by | Comments Off

Documents classified as “secret and confidential” provoke an all-too-human urge to peek at something forbidden. That urge becomes irresistible when those documents are military records. Fold3’s newest title, Confidential Correspondence of the Navy, 1919-1927, lets you sneak back in time to review formerly classified communications of the U.S. Navy during World War I, the immediate postwar years, and the first years after the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922.

The records document U.S. naval involvement with foreign countries, application of technology to naval matters, establishment of overseas bases, appropriations, tactical doctrine, naval strategy, peacetime naval maneuvers, and wartime naval operations.

A few of the many highlights:

Files are organized by master numbers assigned to a variety of subjects and locations. Major sets of files titled Hawaiian Islands, German Peace Treaty, Radio, War Plans, and others are explained further in the Fold3 description. Explore these historically enlightening, formerly classified documents within the Confidential Correspondence of the Navy, 1919-1927 on Fold3.