In 2008, the staff at the National Archives approached the Federation of Genealogical Societies (now NGS) about spearheading a large, consequential preservation and access project. They reported that the War of 1812 pension files were the heaviest requested materials of all the record sets that had never been microfilmed. With that level of use, these valuable records, available in no other format, were in danger of grave deterioration.
On April 27, 2010, the Federation of Genealogical Societies announced a national fundraising initiative to raise over $3 million to support the monumental task of digitizing the 7.2 million pages contained in 180,000 files.
Fold3 was selected to digitize the records based on a bidding process between in-house and pre-approved contractors at NARA. Shortly after Fold3 was selected to digitize the files, Ancestry.com (parent company of Fold3) agreed to match every dollar raised for the project, cutting the amount of funding to raise by the community in half.