Family Tree Girl

This may be one of the most important history-related web sites launched so far this year. The following announcement was written by John Clegg, a founder of the African American Civil War Soldiers web site:

African American Civil War Soldiers is a new website that will crowd-source the transcription of the military records of roughly 200,000 African Americans soldiers who fought for their freedom in the American Civil War. These records are of great interest to historians and genealogists, since they contain detailed biographic information on individual Union Army soldiers, most of whom were slaves at the start of the Civil War. However, until now these records have been locked away in the National Archives in DC, accessible only to a select few researchers. Our website invites members of the public to help transcribe scanned images of the soldiers’ records, turning them into text that can easily be searched…