It has now been an entire decade since the tragic events occurred on September 11, 2001. Perhaps you were not a genealogist before that day. In the ten years since, though, plenty of people have taken up the hobby of genealogy. There are some online archives that related to September 11th that genealogists can use for their research.
This is one of those situations where your living relatives can, potentially, provide you with information that is helpful for your genealogy research. You can record their experiences, their feelings, and their memories of that day. There could be quite a few family stories that happened as a result of this event. Your relatives may have old photos of loved ones who died that day.
CNN has created a website called “September 11 – A Memorial”. It is an alphabetical listing of the people who died that day, (and I believe it is still being updated). If you click on someone’s name, it brings you to another page that is a memorial for that individual. This is where people can leave messages, comments, prayers or memories of that person.
The CNN memorial says each person’s name, and how old the person was when he or she died. It lists their employer, the city they lived in, the state they lived in, and the country they were a citizen of. It also says where the person died, (the most frequent listing is “World Trade Center”), and the last time that this information was updated.
The State of New York also has an online archive. It is called “9-11 Memory & History – What to save and how”. This website gives people some excellent advice about what you should do with documents, photos, objects, or recordings that evoke the memory of the people you lost on September 11th, 2001.
There are suggestions about what kinds of things you should keep for yourself, what you should save for history, and what you should discard. It also has information about how to preserve those mementos.
The September 11 Digital Archive is in its beta version right now. There is a link to take you to the previous version of the archive if you want to see it. This archive has over 150,000 digital items. There are 40,000 emails and other electronic communications, over 40,000 first hand stories, and more than 15,000 digital images. This archive was accepted into the collections of the Library of Congress in September of 2003. Genealogists can browse through this collection or share their own story by adding it to the archives.
The Internet Archive has a collection of news footage that appeared on television on September 11th, 2001, and for six days after that. If you are interested in learning more about the historical events of that day, you should take a look at this archive.
If you do not want to watch video images, but still want to know more about the news from that time, then I would suggest looking at the archive collection from TIME magazine. It has all of their magazines that were produced from September 14th, 2001, through August 12th, 2002, that contain news articles regarding September 11th, 2001.
Image by mrdoubtfire on Flickr