New Genealogy Records Coming.

The United States Library of Congress has about 29 million books.

What library archives in the U.S has 132 times more than that?

What library has about 100,000 volunteers indexing some 5 billion images of original documents?

Da, da, da, da - Da, dum, dum. (Think Jeopardy!)





Well that would be the Family History Library (FHL,) of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, (the Mormon church,) and commonly referred to as LDS. The LDS - FHL will be rolling out a new look soon at their very familiar Internet portal at, www.familysearch.org.

For many years through the use of microfilm and microfiche that the church has been collecting for decades from all around the world, we have had access to partially transcribed collections and submissions to the library from church members and various patrons of all type. We used the Ancestral File, the International Genealogical Index (IGI,) and other collections that helped us locate records on our ancestors. The church has about 2 1/2 million rolls of microfilm alone, and the former indexes and finding aids covered only a smidgen of what they have available.

Soon we will see a new look and feel to the website as more and more original documents become available and in most cases have never seen the light of day to a typical researcher. Buried within church, civil, military records and other items in archives all over the world, the only way we had access to them before was to search the library catalog for films or media that might possibly have records of use to our particular quest. Now with the indexing program a great many of these obscure files will be digitized and made available on-line!

It's a GREAT time to be doing family history research!

(genemisc)