To celebrate Memorial Day and honor all who have served in the U.S. Armed Forces, Ancestry.com is offering free public access to its U.S. Military Collection from May 20 through May 31, 2008. This collection of military records features more than 100 million names and 700 titles and databases, from all 50 U.S. states.

The announcement of free access to historical military records at Ancestry.com was part of a much bigger announcement of a partnership between the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and Ancestry.com - one first proposed back in March of this year. The nonexclusive agreement is similar to one that NARA already has in place with Footnote.com and FamilySearch.org. The terms of each individual agreement between NARA and its partners vary, but essentially the partner (in this case Ancestry.com) digitizes and hosts certain NARA holdings at its expense. Each partner negotiates its own agreement with respect to fees that may be charged for access to the records on its Web site, but free access to the digitized records is always available in NARA's research rooms.

Ancestry.com already has millions of historical records from the National Archives in its online collection, including passenger lists from 1820-1960 and WWI and WWII draft registration cards. The new agreement means increased online access to the vast holdings of NARA at a rate much faster than NARA could offer on its own. The initial NARA collections to be digitized under this agreement include Death Notices of U.S. Citizens Abroad from 1835-1974 and INS Passenger and Crew Arrival and Departure Lists from 1897-1958 - records which have previously only been available to the public through NARA research facilities. More on the agreement and the long-term relationship between Ancestry.com and NARA, including some interesting statistics on the vast number of NARA records that have already been digitized, can be found at www.ancestry.com/nara.

This is a win-win arrangement for genealogists as far as I'm concerned. I can't wait!