The following excerpt is from an article posted at rafu.com:
In remembrance of the 70th anniversary of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, which placed more than 120,000 Japanese Americans in internment camps, Ancestry.com, the world’s largest online family history resource, is offering free access until Feb. 23 to its extensive internment camp record collections.
The more than 180,000 records, spanning 1942-45, allow all Americans a chance to better understand the nation’s wartime mindset and the effect it had on Japanese Americans. For those with Japanese heritage, these databases offer a glimpse into their families’ removal from their homes and businesses and insights into how they were forever affected by their internment. To begin searching, users can visit www.ancestry.com/japanese.
The U.S. government viewed the Dec. 7, 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor as justification to relocate people of Japanese descent living on the West Coast and place them in internment camps throughout the interior of the country. As the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) report stated, the forced removal and mass incarceration was the result of racism, opportunism and a failure of political leadership.
