KDSN RADIO News
Wealth of Iowa historical records to be digitized to ease family research
(Radio Iowa) The State Historical Society of Iowa is renewing its partnership with Ancestry.com that will broaden public access to millions of archival documents at no cost to the state’s taxpayers.
Tony Jahn, the state archivist and the historical society’s library and archives bureau chief, says it will offer Iowans — and researchers everywhere — unprecedented insights into the state’s past.
“Well, it’s a very big deal,” Jahn says. “We’ve been working very closely with Ancestry.com since 2012, preserving through digitizing primarily government records that we have — birth, death, marriage, divorce, other records of interest to family history researchers, commonly known as genealogists, and it’s in the millions.”
The agreement between the historical society and Ancestry.com will integrate a wide range of documents from the state archives into the website’s searchable database.
“Since we last did our last batch of a few million a few years ago, time has passed and there’s entire categories of records that are now available,” Jahn says, “and we’re excited to be able to digitize, over the next 12 to 18 months, just short of a million records.”
Just scanning the individual pages of documents doesn’t take terribly long, but Jahn says it can be very time-consuming to create the metadata, all of the things that make that information more easily searchable.
“They can type in a name and they’ll be able to find it, or type in dates, type in where they lived, counties they reside in,” Jahn says, “and be able to then cross-compare that with other information that’s already been digitized and available online and get more thorough search results so they can discover more about their families, their background, their parents, their grandparents.”
In addition to the vital records, this project will see the digitizing of state-level military files including Iowa National Guard enlistment records, World War One and Two casualty files, even records from the prison system, police records and mug shots. Jahn says the records are of significant genealogical value, not just to Iowans but to people worldwide who can trace their family history back to the state.
“It’s an incredible tool. In the olden days, you’d have to spend weeks and weeks and weeks, and today a lot of this is available at your fingertips,” Jahn says. “The more information that’s available out there, the more you can discover about your family’s past. You can discover about who you are, where you came from, the people that have long since departed.”
Iowans will be able to access the records by using the State Historical Society of Iowa‘s complimentary institutional account at the Research Center or through a paid subscription to Ancestry.com.
