Discovering Your Roots

Today Ancestry.com announced its partnership with two leading organizations committed to the preservation of Jewish heritage – Museum afflilate JewishGen, the world’s premier Jewish genealogy website, and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), an overseas humanitarian aid organization committed to providing relief for Jews in more than 70 countries.

The Museum first partnered with JewishGen on January 1, 2003. "We did so," said David Marwell at this morning's press conference, "because we knew that the whole of Jewish history is really the aggregate of individual Jewish family histories, and we knew that the Holocaust presented a seemingly insurmountable challenge to the study of Jewish family history. Jewish family trees were literally hacked apart by the Nazis. JewishGen... has always offered a powerful antidote to the challenges and obstacles presented by the tragic history of the last century."

These partnerships will make millions of important Jewish historical documents available on Ancestry.com, many of which are online for the first time ever and searchable for free. These unique records, including photographs, immigration records, Holocaust records and memorials, can now be searched alongside other records already accessible on Ancestry.com, creating the largest collection of Jewish family history records on the Web with more than 26 million records documenting Jewish life. This is a truly exciting alliance.

You can read more about this exciting new partnership here.

Also, be sure to keep abreast of what is going on in the world of JewishGen by visiting their blog, maintained (in part) our friend on the other side of the cubicle, Avrami.