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…
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…
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…
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…
The famous phrase “Go West, young man,” was first published in an 1851 editorial and later popularized by Horace Greeley to encourage westward expansion. Yet the words never would have been expressed so successfully without an important and farsighted directive issued six decades earlier by the Confederation Congress: The Northwest Ordinance. In “An Ordinance for…
On June 18, 1812, the United States declared war on Great Britain officially launching the War of 1812. In the 200 years since, it has become a forgotten war, perhaps best remembered by school children as when The Star-Spangled Banner was written. Yet, the War of 1812 was strategically important to the future of American…
If you search the Final Payment Vouchers Index for Military Pensions, 1818-1864 and discover Revolutionary War pensioners living in Delaware or Georgia, you now have a way to quickly access their final pension papers—on Fold3. The files may fill in some missing gaps in your family history. In the index, Francis Freeman’s slip indicates that…
