LOS ANGELES — The names of thousands of people held in Japanese American incarceration camps during World War II will be digitized and made available for free, genealogy company Ancestry announced Wednesday.
The website, known as one of the largest global online resources of family history, is collaborating with the Irei Project, which has been working to memorialize more than 125,000 detainees. It's an ideal partnership as the project's researchers were already utilizing Ancestry. Some of the site's collections include nearly 350,000 records.
People will be able to look at more than just names and tell “a bigger story of a person,” said Duncan Ryūken Williams, the Irei Project director.
“Being able to research and contextualize a person who has a longer view of family history and community history, and ultimately, American history, that's what it's about — this collaboration,” Williams told told The Associated Press exclusively.
In response to the 1941 attack by Japan on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on Feb. 19, 1942, to allow for the incarceration of people of Japanese ancestry. The thousands of citizens — two-thirds of whom were Americans — were unjustly forced to leave their homes and relocate to camps with barracks and barbed wire. Some detainees went on to enlist in the U.S. military.
Through Ancestry, people will be able to tap into scanned documents from that era…
