If you are interested in military records, if you have an ancestor who served in the military or both, you might want to take a look at Fold3.com. Named after the third fold on a flag used in some flag-folding ceremonies that honor the service and sacrifice of a veteran in defending his or her country, this website specializes in military records. In fact, the website contains a genealogist’s treasure trove of them.
If you have an ancestor who did any stint in the military in any US war or military conflict or even one who just served without being involved in a conflict, this is a website you do not want to skip in your research journey.
There are military records on Fold3.com dating all the way backward in time to the American Revolutionary War. It is a great resource to use for finding out about your military ancestors. You can use the documents on this site to discover such things as the details of your ancestor’s military service, a timeline and overall look at their military experience, their life before and after their military service, details about their close relatives and friends, their health before and after their military service, military awards they won and why they won them, and so much more.
This site includes the full scope and breadth of US military records available for public view from the US National Archives. In fact, the site partners with the US National Archives to make this valuable content available to the public in an easy-to-access format.
In the past, you would be forced to go to the National Archives in Washington, D.C. to access most of these records. If you didn’t go there in person, you would have to write or call to ask them to do a record search for you. Depending on the type of record you were looking for, you might have to contact an affiliated record repository to the National Archives or go to your state’s archives to look for state militia and national guard records. The establishment of Fold3.com makes these records easily accessible all in one place, to anyone who wants or needs to use them.
You can also discover military records from other countries on Fold3.com. They’ve partnered with the national archives (and equivalent military record repositories) from dozens of other countries. This means that if your ancestor served in a war in a different country, possibly before that branch of your family even immigrated to the United States (if they ever did), there is a chance you might find that record on Fold3.com.
Their collection of foreign military records isn’t as comprehensive as their US collection (although their UK record collection comes close), but still well worth looking at if you have foreign ancestors with military service. You never know what you might discover there that will lead you to completely new information about that ancestor, or even that entire branch of the family in that country.
In addition to military records such as service records, medical records, enlistment records, discharge records, commendation records, promotion records, pension records (and survivors and widows pensions for deceased military veterans), you will find other collections of interest on Fold3.com. An example of this is the WWII diaries collection. Mostly submitted by members, but sometimes obtained from national and local record repositories, these are diaries kept by WWII soldiers and seamen. They are interesting to read, as they are first-hand accounts of the experience of being in that war.
You might find a diary written by someone who served in the same regiment or on the same ship as your ancestor, which will give you a clearer idea of what your ancestor’s military experience was like, and what life was like in general in WWII. You may also strike genealogical gold and discover a diary written by your actual ancestor, or a collateral member of your family tree. These are the types of first-hand accounts that genealogists always hope to discover, and you might just find one or more on Fold3.com.
There is also a memorial wall on Fold3.com. This is a place on the site where members can submit personal details about individual veterans from any military engagement, be it a war, a military action, or simply an uneventful tenure in the military. It is to honor veterans of all types. You may discover that someone has left a memorial to your ancestor, which may allow you to get in touch with the person who posted it, who may be an unknown relative of yours.
You can read the memorials to pay honor and respect to any veteran you like, even if you don’t know them. You can also put up memorials on the wall yourself, to honor your military ancestors in a way that the world can learn about them if they come to the site and look. Remember, what is on the internet is there forever, so you are truly creating a lasting memorial to your military ancestor.
You will also find such useful things on Fold3.com as US federal census records, Civil War stories (first-hand accounts and re-told accounts), Social Security death benefit records, some old newspaper records, FBI case files, New York state naturalization records, bounty land warrant applications, miscellaneous US Federal Government records, and more. This is truly a genealogy site that includes a rich collection of records and is potentially useful to everyone, not just people with military ancestors.
You can sign up for a free account with Fold3.com to peruse the small collection of free-to-view records they have on the site, and you can also sign up for a free seven-day trial to get full access to the site and determine if it is something you want to keep. You can choose from a monthly or annual subscription, and both are priced extremely reasonably for the amount of information you get with your membership. You can also get a discount on a membership if you have an Ancestry membership, or you can sign up for the Ancestry.com All-Access membership and get access to all of the record collections on Ancestry.com, as well as memberships to Newspapers.com and Fold3.com.
Is Fold3.com worth the price for your genealogy research? Only you can answer that. Most genealogists will probably find that the answer is yes.