Saturday Society -- Preserve the Pensions War of 1812

The Federation of Genealogical Societies is spearheading "Preserve the Pensions  - a $3.7 million nationwide fundraising initiative to digitize the long-neglected War of 1812 pension records. This is the first time in history that the entire genealogy community is coming together to see a project of this magnitude to completion.....  from the National Archives to fold3 to individual state and local genealogical societies.

Ancestry.com has generously stepped up and agreed to cover costs to digitize HALF of the War of 1812 pension records. So every dollar donated will actually go twice as far.

Crunching the numbers so you can see what a donation could do:
     At a cost of $.45 per digitized page, your tax deductible gift of $45 would normally digntize 100 pages. But with the help of Ancestry.com it will digitize 200 pages. $112.50 will digitize 250 pages or 500 with Ancestry.com's help. and $450 will digitize a totoal 2,000 pages.

All of the War of 1812 Pension Records digitized with donations will be made available to the public on the fold3 website.

THE MISSION
Why is it so critical  to preserve the War of 1812 Pension Records?
   Right now, there are 180,000 Pension records from the War of 1812 housed at the National Archives, a total of 7,200,000 pages. This year marks the 200th anniversary of the start of the War of 1812, a war some hail as our second Revolutionary War. . So digitizing these fragile  records now is timely.

Why is there such urgency for your support today?
   Ancestry.com has generously agreed to step up and cover half of the costs of the project to digitize the War of 1812 pension records to that each dollar donated foes twice as far.  But time is of the essence. These documents are fragile and need to be digitized quickly to preserve the best possible image of each page.

Another thing to consider also is that Preserve the Pension project is much more than the War of 1812.......  there are millions of Civil War, World War I and II records waiting to be digitized. War of 1812 pension file is only the first step.

If you are interested in the project talk to your board members. This seems like a good cause to get behind......  ((I had a dream that we raised money among our members, and then Root Cellar matched the money raised and then we sent our funds to FGS who doubled our money again with Ancestry.com help. Wow, what a great dream!))

Information from Preserve the Pensions War of 1812 booklet written by FGS

Giving you some food for thought .........  Sandra Gardner-Benward