FamilySearch

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Familysearch:Where Generations Meet.

FamilySearch is a family history website provided by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It provides its resources free of charge to the public and is one of the most heavily used genealogy sites on the Internet.[1]

Contents

[edit] Resources

The primary resources offered by FamilySearch are searchable databases, research guidance, and the catalog of the Family History Library.

FamilySearch provides online access to several databases, which together contain over one billion names.

  • Ancestral File, a database of user data contributed before March 2000, after which date contributions go to Pedigree Resource File mentioned below.
  • Census indexes for the 1880 U.S., 1881 British Isles, and 1881 Canadian censuses.
  • The International Genealogical Index (IGI), which contains data contributed by individuals as well as indexes of original records.
  • Pedigree Resource File, an index to user-contributed family trees uploaded to the FamilySearch site since May 1999.
  • U.S. Social Security Death Index, which contains vital statistics for over 70 million deceased individuals.
  • Vital Records Index, which includes Denmark, Finland, Mexico, Norway, and Sweden.

The website offers two types of research assistance. The Research Guidance service is an online wizard that offers detailed research advice to a user based on answers to a series of questions. Research Helps are research guides that can be read online or, in many cases, downloaded as a PDF. There are hundreds of guides available covering many geographic areas and many types of genealogical records.

The catalog of the Family History Library is also available at FamilySearch. Located in Salt Lake City, Utah, the Library holds genealogical records for over 110 countries, territories, and possessions, including over 2.4 million rolls of microfilmed genealogical records; 742,000 microfiche; 310,000 books, serials, and other formats; and 4,500 periodicals. The microfilm and microfiche can be ordered and viewed at over 4,000 library branches (called Family History Centers) worldwide.

[edit] History of the website

  • May 1999: Website first opened to the public. It almost immediately went off-line; overloaded due to extreme popularity.
  • October 1999: Surpassed 1.5 billion hits.
  • November 1999: 240 million names added, bringing the total number of entries to 640 million.[2]
  • November 2005: New FamilySearch.org enters first Beta test.
  • February 2007: New FamilySearch.org enters Beta 2 testing.
  • June 2007: New FamilySearch.org is now live for some areas.
  • November 2007: limited rollout and access to new.familysearch.org
  • November 2007: Current public site is still www.familysearch.org

[edit] Future of the website

Significant changes are forthcoming for FamilySearch. Eventually it will include such diverse features as a 'Family Tree' feature, the FamilySearch Research Wiki, the completed version of what is now referred to as 'Record Search Pilot, which will contain substantially more indexed records and images than it does now, and several other components that are major efforts in their own right to provide help for genealogists and family historians worldwide.

[edit] Austro-Hungarian Map project

The LDS Church is a partner in a project to create an "easy-to-use digital gazetteer" that "will enable users to find and view scanned ...images from 1877-1914 Austro-Hungarian topographic maps."[3] When completed, this gazetteer will be integrated with the FamilySearch databases, allowing users to click on a place name in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and retrieve a historical map.[4]

[edit] Integration with BYU Family History Archive

Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah is digitizing copyright-free family histories and placing them online.[5], or via a dropdown menu item on the navbar on FamilySearch. Links to the digitized books are being added to the Family History Library catalog at FamilySearch. As of 25 March 2009, this archive currently has over 30,000 digitized books, with approximately 5,000 new titles being posted online every two months on average, although it is anticipated that that pace could accelerate.

[edit] New FamilySearch

The LDS Church is (as of June 28, 2006) developing a web application for members (and, eventually, the public) to be able to interact with a very large, unified databases of connected genealogical information. When fully released, it will be moved into the current FamilySearch.org site and will be called FamilySearch Family Tree. Many of the FamilySearch databases are being combined into one database and all the records for each individual are being combined into folders. These folders are then being linked into pedigrees.

Most of the development work on the new system takes place in offices in the Joseph Smith Memorial Building near Temple Square, Salt Lake City, Utah.

Some prominent features of the new website are:

  • Support for multiple assertions on facts, allowing people to "agree to disagree".
  • Source citations, including links to source images. This promised linking service may not be available in earlier versions. Documents scanned from the Church's 2.4 million rolls of microfilmed vital records, from around the world, will eventually be linked to individuals in the system. These films are currently being scanned and indexed.
  • Several features specific to the membership of the LDS Church, facilitating temple ordinance work.
  • A one-world pedigree of linked families that will operate wiki style with anyone able to add comments and information.
  • A mapping utility that maps locations where an individual has resided. It is a mashup of the new FamilySearch website and Google Maps showing pushpins for events in a person's life.

The new system is being released in phases for members of the Church first, starting with smaller temple districts. As of March 2009, there were 106 of the 129 temple districts online. Once it is rolled out to all the Temple districts, work will begin to make it available to the general public at the FamilySearch.org web site.

[edit] Digitization and indexing projects

Main article: FamilySearch Indexing

The Family History Library (FHL) is in the process of digitizing its entire microfilm collection using ScanStone, a hardware and software system developed by the LDS Church to rapidly create digital images of genealogical records contained on microfilm. When fully implemented, the FHL will be able to convert 370,000 rolls of microfilm per year into digital images. It is estimated that the digitizing project will be completed about 2012.[4]

An online index to the digitized records is also being created using FamilySearch Indexing software developed by the LDS Church. The church hopes to recruit hundreds of thousands of volunteers to complete the indexing project. Volunteers can participate by going to the Church's FamilySearch Indexing web site. Some of the databases containing the digital images and indices can be viewed at Record Search Pilot.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ Alexa traffic report 21 Mar 2009 (excluding #1 Ancestry.com)
  2. ^ News release (16 November 1999) — 240 Million New Names Added to FamilySearch.org
  3. ^ Building a Globally Distributed Historical Sheet Map Set of Austro-Hungarian Topographic Maps, 1877-1914
  4. ^ a b A Sneak Peak (sic) at the Near Future (6 MiB)
  5. ^ BYU Family History Archive

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FamilySearch"
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