Database of Holocaust victims reaches 1 million names

Crowdsourced collaboration between US Holocaust Memorial Museum and Ancestry.com makes records searchable

By AP 10 April 2016, 2:02 am
A picture taken just after the liberation by the Soviet army in January 1945 shows a group of children wearing concentration camp uniforms behind barbed wire fencing in the Auschwitz Nazi concentration camp. (AP Photo/File)

WASHINGTON — An effort to build a free online database of Holocaust victims and survivors has reached a milestone.

The US Holocaust Memorial Museum and Ancestry.com announced Friday that records of one million people persecuted by the Nazis are now available to be searched.

The crowd-sourced database was launched in 2011 and is known as the World Memory Project. Volunteer contributors from around the world have been indexing materials from the museum’s archive so people can be added to the database and searched easily by name.

Among the volunteers is Patricia Lewin, a retired doctor who lives in Los Angeles. She’s indexed the records of more than 79,000 people. In the process, she found out that she had relatives who died in the Holocaust, even though she’s not Jewish.

Copyright 2016 The Associated Press.

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