Today at our annual conference, we announced the receipt of a historic $500,000 anonymous
contribution to the War of 1812 Preserve the Pensions fundraising project. The unprecedented
donation, which came from outside of the genealogical community, will be
matched by Ancestry.com, and in total will provide $1 million to the project. Those
funds, along with crowdsourced funds from the genealogical community have
provided more than $3 million dollars to the project. With these donations, we are able to officially announce the completion of fundraising for “Preserve the
Pensions,” the landmark community fundraising project.
The largest fundraising effort ever initiated for a single
genealogical record set, Preserve the Pensions involved donations from more
than 4,000 individuals and 115 genealogical and lineage societies. Each
donation was generously matched by Ancestry.com.
“We are humbled and grateful for the generosity of the
genealogical community and those outside of our community who are dedicated to
the preservation of records, thank you!” noted D. Joshua Taylor, FGS President.
“This historic gift, in-tandem with the thousands of contributions from
individual genealogists and societies, illustrates the incredible power of the
genealogical community - together we can make a difference.”
The War of 1812 pensions, among the most frequently requested set
of materials within the holdings of the National Archives and Records
Administration (NARA), had never been microfilmed or digitized. Now, with
fundraising complete for the project, and with ongoing cooperation from the
project’s partners and major supporters, NARA, Ancestry, Fold3, and
FamilySearch, these important documents will be made available free, forever to
the general public. The project, set out to raise more than $3 million in 2010,
an unprecedented amount for the genealogical community.
“It’s gratifying to see the
fundraising portion of this project completed after five years, and now we look
forward to ensuring these important records are preserved,” said Ancestry
President and CEO Tim Sullivan. “This is a fantastic moment for FGS, the
genealogical community, and future generations who will benefit from the
perseveration of these rich pension records. We want to thank the more than
4,000 individuals who have contributed and are thrilled to play a matching role
in this campaign.”
We were the driving force behind the Civil War Soldiers and Sailors project alongside the National Parks Service. Since 2010, we have been actively involved in Preserve the Pensions, an effort to raise more than $3 million to digitize and make freely available the pension files from the War of 1812.
