The New York State Military Museum Web site has announced the release of 53,671 pages of New York National Guard records, available on the Web site at http://www.dmna.state.ny.us/historic/index.htm with a direct link to the pages at http://www.dmna.state.ny.us/historic/research/researchIndex.htm.

The new material includes 197 issues of the New York National Guardsman Magazine published between 1924 and 1940, and National Guard annual reports from 1858 to 1955. The documents are available in PDF format but some of them are pretty huge — they range in size from 3MB to over 80MB! The Guardsman documents are listed by year/month, while the annual reports are available by year, with a few of years available in multiple volumes (and a few other years not available.)

These archives are valuable to genealogy buffs because they have a lot of names in them, but I didn’t find an easy way to search them. The site seems to have a Google custom search engine, but there’s no way that I can find to easily search the archives from within the site itself. However, the archives are consistent in where the PDFs are kept, so start with this Google search:

site:dmna.state.ny.us inurl:historic inurl:research filetype:pdf

That’ll find you 199 results from the New York State Military Museum Web site. Just add the name you’re searching to that and you’ll (hopefully) narrow down on what you’re looking for. Try this for an example:

“john smith” site:dmna.state.ny.us inurl:historic inurl:research filetype:pdf