c. 1999 Religion News Service
UNDATED _ Much to the delight of genealogists, the Mormons are preparing to make some of their vast holdings of family records available on the World Wide Web for the first time next month, if not sooner.
The new Web site (http://www.familysearch.org) won’t officially launch until mid-April, but it is expected to “go live” for testing any day now. Church officials originally planned to leave the site open to all during the test period. But for fear of being swamped, they now may limit access to official testers with assigned passwords.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints collects genealogical records of all kinds because the Mormons believe it is important to perform religious rites on behalf of dead ancestors. It has the world’s largest collection of such data.
Genealogy is one of the most popular subjects on the Internet. As more information goes online, it seems to create more genealogists. About 100 million Americans have at least dabbled in it, and 19 million actively research their family history, according to a 1995 Maritz Marketing Research study for American Demographics magazine.
Rootsweb (http://www.rootsweb.org) has more than 200,000 subscribers to 3,000 e-mail lists about genealogy. The number of subscribers is growing rapidly, according to John V. Wylie, a professional genealogist from Grand Prairie, Texas. Wylie is a co-founder of GENTECH (http://www.gentech.org), a non-profit society to help genealogists use technology.
LDS church officials are vague about what Web surfers can expect to find on their new site, but that hasn’t dampened genealogists’ enthusiasm.
“I think the reaction is probably going to be unanimously, `Wow! It’s about time!”’ said Marthe Arends, editor of the newsletter Pioneers Online (http://www.eskimo.com/~mnarends), based in Bellevue, Wash. The newsletter helps genealogists use the Internet.
With 2 billion rolls of microfilm, 700,000 microfiches and 280,000 books, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (http://www.lds.org) is the ultimate source for many genealogists. Anyone can use the materials at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City free of charge. They may also borrow materials for a small handling fee at any one of the library’s 3,200 branches.
A tiny, but important portion of that is available by computer. In 1978, the church began computerizing some of its records in a program dubbed FamilySearch. The program is currently only offered at libraries and branch libraries.
The church won’t sell FamilySearch to individuals because it can’t afford to offer everyone support for DOS, the older operating system the program requires. That makes it the perfect candidate for putting on the Web.
One of the first FamilySearch databases expected to be offered online is Ancestral File. The simple database lets surfers type in names and find family trees compiled by other researchers, mostly amateurs.
“As useful as that can be, the information is only as good as the person who submitted it,” said Arends. “I’d personaly like to see more primary sources being put online.”
The International Genealogical Index, also part of FamilySearch, lets researchers search millions of marriage, death and birth records taken from records in the United States and abroad. The church won’t say if the index will be offered on the Web site.
Even with thousands of church volunteers typing the information from original records into computers, “We can digitize only a tiny fraction of what we capture each year,” said David Rencher, manager of public outreach for the Family History Department of the Mormon Church.
Still, the output is impressive.
Over the past year, the church not only updated FamilySearch, but also released five sets of CD-ROMs containing information reaching back 450 years and ranging from Australian Vital Records to the 1851 British Census. In 1999, it will release the full 1880 U.S. Census and the 1881 British Census, both on CD-ROM.
Church volunteers are also working on a 17-million-person database of Ellis Island immigrants that will be released on CD-ROM by the church, posted online by the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation (http://www.ellisisland.org) and made available at the new American Family Immigrant History Center due to open late next year on Ellis Island.
“There’s no doubt the interest in genealogy is very high out there,” said Peg Zitko, director of public affairs for the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation.
“Our Web site has gotten 67 million hits in 14 months, and we get hundreds of e-mails every week. Ninety percent of them are looking for genealogy records.”
“Certainly computerization and the Net have made it easier to do genealogy,” said Rencher. “You get on a browser and there’s a link to a genealogy site and you just go with it and before you know it, you’re up all night searching.”
DEA END WYLIE
