Digital Holocaust Collection

Today, Footnote, the National Archives and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum announced the release of an Interactive Digital Holocaust Collection. You can read a press release about it here.

Original historical documents from the National Archives include:

• Concentration camp registers and documents from Dachau, Mauthausen, Auschwitz, and Flossenburg.
• The "Ardelia Hall Collection" of records relating to the Nazi looting of Jewish possessions, including looted art.
• Captured German records including deportation and death lists from concentration camps.
• Nuremberg War Crimes Trial proceedings.

You can get to these collections through this page. Footnote is still working to digitize many of these records, but there are already 500,000 images available.

The collection also includes Footnote Pages created for over 600 people who survived or perished in the Holocaust with stories and photos provided by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and Pages for each of the major concentration camps of the Holocaust. You can add your own stories, photos links, comments and more to these pages or create a page of your own.

Here's an example Page where I transcribed a 7 May 1945 letter written by Private First Class Harold Porter to his parents from the Dachau concentration camp. Porter describes in detail what he saw upon entering the camp.

Lizzie Borden

Today I came across this Footnote Page about Lizzie Borden by Edward1026 which brought back memories of my college days and a professor I had who was an expert on the case.

I took a few minutes to see what I could find in contemporary newspaper reports and a few minutes was enough to find...

An Aug 13, 1892 San Francisco Chronicle report of the arraignment of Lizzie Borden, "charging her with the homicide and murder" of her father and stepmother, complete with illustrations.

Here's a similar report from the Aug 13, 1892 Atlanta Constitution

Two days later the Constitution took a stand on the case. You don't see statements like, "New England criminal justice is stupid and barbarous," too often in news reports these days.

Here are reports of Lizzie Borden's acquittal from the San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune and Atlanta Constitution.

Can you find something interesting about Lizzie Borden on Footnote?

Life Publishes New Hemingway Photos

In 1952, Life magazine published a novella by Ernest Hemingway and wanted some pictures to accompany it. They sent Alfred Eisenstaedt to Cuba, where Hemingway was living, to get some pictures.

The novella, "The Old Man and the Sea" was one of Hemingway's last works and became one of his best known. The issue of Life that included it sold 5.3 million copies in 2 days and the story was required reading by the time I got to high school.

Most of Eisenstaedt's photos were not used in the magazine, but Life has posted the photos to their website.

Sounds like Hemingway made things tough for Eisenstaedt who "would refered "to the experience of shooting “Papa” Hemingway as his most difficult assignment ever."

The Court Marshall of George Armstrong Custer

From mid-September into October of 1867, a General Court Marshall was held at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas for then Brevet Major-General George Armstrong Custer.

Custer faced two main charges:

1. Absence without leave from his command
2. Conduct to the prejudice of good order and military discipline

Additional charges were brought against Custer for further prejudicing good order and military discipline by giving orders to pursue some supposed deserters and shoot them down without a trial.

You can read the proceedings of the trial starting here.

Here's a page from the testimony of one of the men that Custer instructed to "get on your horse and go after those deserters and shoot them down."

Custer provided a written defense which he said he had "sought to compress ... within the smallest possible compass and if it still seem long, it is because fewer words could no be employed to express what I believe to be a fair and temperate review of the evidence now before you." The written defense rambled for 45 pages.

The Court found Custer guilty on all charges and sentenced him, "to be suspended from rank and command for one year, and forfeit his pay proper for the same time."

In September of 1868, William T Sherman sent this telegraph asking for that Custer be reinstated because of a need for "active young field officers of cavalry":

Other interesting Custer related documents on Footnote include:

• A larger number of photos of Custer in the Brady Civil War photos collection. There may be more photos of Custer in the Brady collection than any other individual. It's interesting to watch his hair grow.
• An account of the "Scene of the Slaughter of Custer's Command" in the July 7, 1876 Chicago Tribune.
• A Civil War Pension Index card for Custer that gives his place of death as "Little Bighorn Riv., Mont.

The US Constitution - 17 September 1787

On this date in 1787, the Constitutional Convention completed its work on the US Constitution and 39 of the 55 delegates who had worked on it signed their names to the completed document.

Click the image above to see a high resolution image of this page and use the filmstrip below the image to see the other pages of the constitution, the Bill of Rights and the other amendments.

The National Archives has a nice page with a painting of the signers, and links to information about them.

For those of you who like to get into the details, on Footnote you can also browse through the Records of the Constitutional Convention to see what it took to create a new government for the United States.

Wanted: A Brain

In these tough economic times, you need every edge you can get. Here's a tip from a 1907 ad in the San Francisco Chronicle

The Sacking of Washington DC Aug 24, 1814

On August 24, 1814 British troops took over Washington DC and burned the Capitol, the President's Mansion, the Treasury and various other public buildings.

George Munger's drawing of the U.S. Capitol following British attempts to burn the building

Woodcut illustration of "The Taking of the City of Washington"

President James Madison Describes the Sacking of Washington DC in a proclamation. Published in the Poughkeepsie Journal, September 14, 1814.

Color Photos From Russia 1909 to 1915

In 1948 the Library of Congress purchased a collection of color photographs from a photographic survey of Russia made between 1909 and 1912, and again in 1915, by Russian photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944).

Photographs from the collection can be viewed on this site. The intro to the project says,

"The photographs of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) offer a vivid portrait of a lost world--the Russian Empire on the eve of World War I and the coming revolution. His subjects ranged from the medieval churches and monasteries of old Russia, to the railroads and factories of an emerging industrial power, to the daily life and work of Russia's diverse population."

Like the color photos from World War I mentioned in an earlier post, it's amazing how color makes these people and places seem more real and yet, particularly in these photos by Prokudin-Gorskii, the way he produced his color and the subjects he photographed give many of this pictures a remarkable, otherworldly feel.

Here are a few examples from the collection:

"The Emir of Bukhara, Alim Khan (1880-1944), poses solemnly for his portrait, taken in 1911 shortly after his accession."

"Wooden Chapel on the Site of Old Belozersk"

"Ethnic Russian settlers to the Mugan Steppe region, south of the Caucasus Mountains and west of the Caspian Sea..."

"Cathedral of St. Nicholas, Mozhaisk"


"Workers, identified by Prokudin-Gorskii as Greeks, pose while harvesting tea from plants spreading over rolling hills near Chakva, on the east coast of the Black Sea."

"In a photograph taken near Samarkand, an old man, probably an ethnic Tajik, holds birds he has just caught."

Gertrude Ederle: First Woman to Swim the English Channel

I heard this story about Gertrude Ederle on NPR today. On August 6, 1926, at the age of 20, Ederle became the first woman to swim across the English Channel. Up to that point only 5 men had done it and she beat all of their times by a significant margin. Sounds like she was a great character, which made me wonder what I could find about her on Footnote.

I put her name in the search and at the top of the results list was her record in the 1930 Census. Here's her whole family. You'll notice that her mom was also named Gertrude:

The second result was her Footnote Page created from the Social Security Death Index, to which I added some photos, a fact and a quote, mentioned in the NPR story, from New York Mayor Jimmy Walker who told Ederle, "When history records the greatest crossings, they will speak of Moses crossing the Red Sea, Caesar the Rubicon and Washington the Delaware, and, frankly, your crossing of the English Channel will take place alongside these."

Then there were several newspaper articles about her including these two from before her swim (Footnote only has the San Francisco Chronicle and Chicago Tribune through 1923):

And this one from The Roundup Record of Musselshell County, Montana defending her swim against criticism from "various English newspapers"

Daniel Shays Draws a Pension

At the beginning of his book The Summer of 1787: The Men Who Invented the Constitution, David O Stewart lays out some of the events that prepared the United States for the constitutional convention that would create a new and more robust system of government.

Stewart describes Shays Rebellion as one of those preparatory events and then mentions that after the rebellion was over, Daniel Shays, a veteran of the Revolutionary War, fled to Vermont, asked for and received a pardon and later drew a pension for his service in the Revolution.

That got me thinking, so I poked around the Footnote site to see what I could find on Mr. Shays.

I found several things related to his military service, including his Revolutionary War Service Record. Here's the first of 17 pages:

He also appears several times in the Revolutionary War Rolls for the Massachusetts 5th Regiment. Here's a muster roll for his company from October of 1779:

And here's a record from the Revolutionary War Pensions collection. After Daniel's death, his wife asked for and received a continuation of the pension he was so generously given despite the fact that he gave his name to Shays Rebellion:

The 58 page pension file even includes this 1945 letter, written in response to a request for information, which reviews details of Shays' service and pension: