The Family Tree
By Terence L. Day
Terence L. Day, genealogist and journalist, is on the Washington State University faculty. He welcomes e-mail at genealogy@moscow.com, or regular mail in care of the Tri-City Herald City newsroom, P.O. Box 2608, Tri-Cities, WA 99302-2608.
Mormon Church's genealogy Web site more popular than expected
This story was published June 20, 1999
Never has genealogy made such big news as it did recently when the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints launched its World Wide Web site - FamilySearch.
All who care about genealogy, and millions who don't, know the story. It was big news throughout the country, even making major network television newscasts.
The Church's Family History Department tried hard to overestimate interest in their Web launch. During a brief test phase, "hits," or connections, were registered from more than 80 nations, including Antarctica!
The church added computer capacity far beyond its best estimate of needs, but interest in FamilySearch's May 25 launch quickly crashed the computers.
Within hours, the site was back on line, getting 400 to 500 visitors per second, which translates into something like 40 million a day.
Some estimated that an additional 60 million people were unable to connect on launch day because the modems were all busy.
So what's the big deal about the Mormon genealogy site coming to the World Wide Web?
It's simply that this new on-line service is the world's largest genealogical database, and many believe it is only a first step for the church.
But even if services aren't expanded, this Web site constitutes the greatest advance in genealogical research technology since the church began microfilming records in 1938 - the vintage year of my birth.
Microfilm is what made genealogy a practical avocation for laymen. It made it possible for essentially anyone anywhere in the developed world to do research based on church and public records anywhere else in most of Western civilization.
I can't go to England and paw through parish records for information on my ancestors, but I can borrow a microfilm of those records and search them at any of more than 3,000 Mormon Family History Centers scattered throughout the world.
These records and facilities are free for anyone to use, regardless of whether they belong to the Mormon Church. The only charge is for the cost of mailing the microfilm to and from Salt Lake City.
The church currently has an estimated 2 billion names on more than 2 million rolls of microfilm stored in state-of-the-art vaults deep in Granite Mountain in the Wasatch Mountains near Salt Lake City. Copies of this microfilm is what genealogists use at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, or in the Family History Centers in other communities.
Now this information is becoming available in the comfort of our homes, at our convenience. No waiting for the Family History Center to open. No Sunday or Monday closings.
We can access information at the new church Web site 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. It will be a long time before all 2 billion names stored in Granite Mountain are available on the Web, but that is the promise of the church's new site.
Quickly, here's what's on FamilySearch:
-- Ancestral File, a lineage-linked database of genealogical information submitted since 1978.
-- The International Genealogical Index.
-- The Family History Library Catalog.
-- The Family History SourceGuide, an automated file containing hundreds of guides on how to conduct genealogical research in various localities.
-- Links to about 4,000 Web sites containing genealogical databases. This will be greatly expanded.
You also can use the FamilySearch site to correct misinformation in the church's databases and to contribute information on your family. Yes, there are mistakes in the holdings. We have found them in our family's data.
If you are at all interested in genealogy, I heartily recommend you set your browser to www.familysearch.org/ and play around awhile. For the record, the site has glitches. Nothing this big could be free of them. But you can bet the glitches will be fixed as they come to light and this site is refined and more fully developed.
We are witnessing a truly revolutionary technological development.