Ancestry website to catalogue names of Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II
LOS ANGELES — The names of thousands of people held in Japanese-American prison 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 online resources for family history, partners with the Irei Project, which is committed to memorializing more than 125,000 inmates. It is an ideal collaboration because the researchers on the project were already using 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,” says Duncan Ryūken Williams, director of the Irei Project.
“Being able to research and contextualize a person who has a longer view of family history and community history, and ultimately American history, is what this collaboration is all about,” Williams exclusively told The Associated Press.
In response to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, authorizing the incarceration of people of Japanese descent. The thousands of civilians – two-thirds of whom were Americans – were unjustly forced to leave their homes and move to camps with barracks and barbed wire. Some detainees subsequently enlisted in the U.S. military.
Through Ancestry, people can use scanned documents from the era, such as military draft cards, photos from World War II and census records from the 1940s and 1950s, most of which will be accessible outside a paywall.
Williams, a professor of religion at the University of Southern California and a Buddhist priest, says Ancestry will have names that have been diligently spell-checked. Researchers from the Irei Project have made great efforts to verify names that were mutilated on government camp rosters and other documents.
“So our project, we say it is both a project of remembrance and a project of repair,” Williams said. “We are trying to correct the historical record.”
The Irei Project debuted at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles with a massive book containing a list of verified names the week of February 19, a day of remembrance for the Japanese American community. The book, called the Ireichō, will be on display until December 1. The project also launched its own website with the names and light installations at old campsites and the museum.