New tool makes information about victims of Nazi persecution now searchable online

People who want to find out more about the fate of family members who became victims of the Nazi Holocaust now have a new resource online. The World Memory Project, jointly set up by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and the website ‘Ancestry.com’, allows people to sift online through documents that previously required a lengthy manual search. Since May, more than 2,200 people from around the world have indexed more than 700,000 records. That means data on more than 30,000 people can be searched online. The information can be entered by anyone and comes from various historical documents.

The US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC has more than 170 million documents about victims of Nazi persecution, including concentration camp records and transport lists, records created by Jewish communities and US government documents about people displaced by the war who later immigrated to the United States. The project began in May 2011 and recruits volunteers to put names and other key words from the documents into an online database, which is then searchable by anyone in the world. The first data sets became searchable earlier this month.

Once people locate information online about family members, they can request copies of the full documents from the museum. The service is free and will remain so. To ensure accuracy, two volunteers index each document. Their work is reviewed by a third, more experienced arbitrator, who resolves any discrepancies.

Project director Lisa Yavnai told CNN: "This project is about restoring the identities of the victims, the people who the Nazis tried to erase. They – the Nazis - gave them numbers, and we are giving them back their names, and the public can help us do this.