Four million newspaper pages have been put online as part of a massive history project. The British Newspaper Archive website includes pages from more than 200 different papers from across the UK and Ireland…

The Virginia Historical Society recently launched Unknown No Longer, a database of Virginia slave names. The database builds on work of the Historical Society’s “Guide to African American Manuscripts.”

Archives.com has joined in partnership with the National Archives of the United States to provide the public with free digital access to the 1940 Federal Population Census beginning on April 2, 2012. In close collaboration with the National Archives, Archives.com will build a website for researchers to browse, view, and download images from the 1940 Census, the most important collection of newly released U.S. genealogy records in a decade…

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Ancestry.com announced that material from four Museum collections containing information on more than 30,000 victims of Nazi persecution is now available online at Ancestry.com and can be searched at no cost. The collections contain information on thousands of individuals including displaced Jewish orphans; Czech Jews deported to the Terezin concentration camp and camps in occupied Poland; and French victims of Nazi persecution.

Deceased Online is “the first central database of statutory burial and cremation registers for the UK and Republic of Ireland – a unique resource for family history researchers and professional genealogists.” Launched in 2008, Deceased Online already has more than 5 million records from over 30 cemeteries and crematoriums online, and consistently wins awards as one of the best UK web sites for family history…

Footnote.com announced the first online publishing of the War of 1812 Pension and Bounty Land Warrant Applications. In cooperation with the Federation of Genealogical Societies (FGS) and the National Archives, Footnote.com is currently digitizing millions of War of 1812 records and making them available on its site free of charge. The initial 1,400 images are available today and the collection [...]

As its contribution to the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, the LDS Church-sponsored organization, FamilySearch.org, has released millions of online records from the Confederate and Union armies. The collection includes thousands of enlistment or pension records that can provide key family data, including age, birthplace or spouse’s name. Other collections, such as census records, are more focused on “ordinary [...]

A trove of papers and photographs documenting the lives of Holocaust victims and survivors includes notable names like Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel and former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. But Benzion Baumrind’s name might have stayed forgotten to his descendants without the records kept by a humanitarian aid agency. A genealogist discovered Baumrind, one of 6 million Jews [...]

FamilySearch now offers 140 free lessons on FamilySearch.org, enabling people anywhere in the world to access family history expertise any time. The topics range from basic research to training on specific record types and can be beneficial to both beginners and experienced researchers. Most of the classes come from research consultants in the world-famous Family History Library in Salt Lake [...]

The National Archives and Ancestry.com published newly digitized Civil War records online for the first time Wednesday, allowing users to trace family links to the war between North and South. Nearly 275,000 newly published pages are among the most heavily used documents for research in the National Archives’ Civil War holdings. The pages contain about 3 million names of those [...]