Readers are hopefully aware that the War of 1812 Pension Files are free to use at Fold3. Use of the material requires the setting up of a free account on Fold3
, but no payment is required to utilize the images. The Federation of Genealogical Societies and Fold3
are requesting donations in order to keep the project going (and I’m not opposed to that), but I’m going to throw out the idea of a different sort of donation to this database.
The indexing of names.
One of the great features of the Revolutionary War Pensions on Fold3.com is the fact that every name is indexed and searchable. Currently the War of 1812 pension files are indexed by the name of the pensioner. There is not an index to every name in every file.
While I realize that digitizing these files is a high priority, I also know that there are those who use the files and, for a variety of reasons, choose not to contribute financially. That’s a personal decision each person has to make for themselves. However as something to consider:
For those War of 1812 pension files that you’ve used and downloaded for an ancestor or a relative, consider annotating the names of the other people mentioned in that file. Then those names will come up on search results of the pension files.
If users annotated one file, the number of names in the index would increase substantially and the chance that all of us find people we are looking for would increase–people who gave testimony, people who are mentioned as comrades, etc.
Just a thought–and it wouldn’t even cost you two cents <grin>.
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[…] my Rootdig blog, I recently mentioned that users of the free War of 1812 pensions at Fold3.com could help with that project in ways other than giving money. The pensions are only […]