Veteran’s Day is a time to remember, and honor, your relatives and ancestors who served in the military. Genealogists can find plenty of online resources that they can use to help discover more about their ancestors who served in the military. Some photo archives are especially interesting, even if they are not specifically about an ancestor of yours.
Ancestry.com has the world’s largest online collection of historical military documents. There is a guide you can download that gives you advice about how to find the answers that you are looking for on their website.
You can search through their Revolutionary War collection, their Civil War collection, their World War I collection, their World War II collections, or their collection of “Other Conflicts”. Or, you can sort through their entire military records collections at once.
FamilySearch has some Historical Record Collections that genealogists can search through for free. Most of them have images. Choose from: “Florida, Confederate Veterans and Widows Pension Applications, 1885-1955”, “United States, 1890 Census of Union Veterans and Widows of the Civil War”, “United States, Applications for Headstones for Military Veterans, 1925-1941”.
Or, you can also search through: “United States, Records of Headstones of Deceased Union Veterans, 1879-1903”, “United States, Veterans Administration Pension Payment Cards, 1907-1933”, or “Veterans with Federal Service Buried in utah, Territorial to 1966”.
CNN has a photo series called “Faces of World War II”. Portraits of real veterans were taken by Tom Sanders, author of the book “The Last Good War: The Faces and Voices of WW2”. He wanted to increase awareness of our veterans’ sacrifices, and to help put people’s lives into perspective.
CNN also has a photo archive that is called “Honor a veteran”. Anyone who wanted to share a photo of their loved one, before November 10, 2011, could do so. It is a modern, online, way of honoring that person today. Photos include the loved one’s rank, branch, and date of service.
At first glance, it appears that some photos have been added today, November 11, 2011. If you intend to add the photo of your ancestor who served his or her country to this archive, there may still be an opportunity for you to do that.
The Denver Post has a photo archive of Veteran’s Day ceremonies that took place around the nation on November 11, 2011. There are a total of fourteen photos, and each has a caption that tells more about where the ceremony shown in the photograph took place.
Image by Beverly & Pack on Flickr