Ancestry.com is in the middle of a 15 day celebration of their 15th anniversary. They are making one data collection free each day between the 1st and 15th of October (thus they are a little over half way through) and they are giving away a prize each day, and a grand prize after the 15th (going behind the scenes of the NBC TV show Who Do You Think You Are? with Lisa Kudrow). Each collection they make available for free remains free through October 15th, so you can access all the ones made available so far:

Oct 1 – Social Security Death Index
Oct 2 – Ireland, Griffith’s Valuation, 1848–1864
Oct 3 – California Marriage Index, 1960–1985
Oct 4 – Bavaria, Germany, WWI Personnel Rosters, 1914–1918 (in German)
Oct 5 – 1920 U.S. Federal Census
Oct 6 – Australian Electoral Rolls, 1903–1980
Oct 7 – Texas Birth Index, 1903–1997
Oct 8 – Sweden, Births from the Swedish Death Index, 1947–2006 (in Swedish)
Oct 9 – World War I Draft Registration Cards, 1917–1918

More collections will be made available Oct 10-15.

Today’s collection, WWI Draft Registration Cards, 1917-1918 is a particularly interesting collection if your family lived in the US during WWI, as all males were registered (even if they were unable to be soldiers) and the registration cards can provide information on where the person was living, where they were born, etc. I discuss these draft cards in my article Finding Information on US Immigrants.

To access these collections, go to the Ancestry 15th Anniversary Collections page.

From that page you can also click on the link (and orange button that says Enter Now) to take you to the daily sweepstakes page where they are giving away a prize every day until the 15th (and then the aforementioned grand prize to go behind the scenes on the NBC TV show Who Do You Think You Are?).

Today’s prize is an iPad 2…