Saturday, May 1, 2010

FamilySearch Adds 300M Records

Over the past week, I've been keeping an eye out for what's been happening in Salt Lake City at the NGS Conference, and I have been reading Dick Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter and Randy Seaver's Genea-Musings blogs, as well as Thomas MacEntee's Geneabloggers, the Mormon Times newspaper, and of course, the NGS blog.

A few Canadians (that I know of) have been down to the conference including Alison Hare (she gave two lectures there, and will appear at the upcoming OGS Conference 2010), Ed Zapletal and Rick Cree from Moorshead Magazines, and Louise St. Denis from the National Institute of Genealogical Studies.

As well, Chris McPhail from the British Isles Family History Society of Greater Ottawa (BIFHSGO) was there to pick up first prize in the Anglo-Saxon Connection newsletter category, for their newsletter, Anglo-Celtic Roots. Congratulations to BIFHSGO, and to Chris, as editor!

If I missed any fellow Canadians there, please send me an email, and I will mention you here.

One thing which we can check on at home is the new beta version of the FamilySearch website, FSBeta.FamilySearch.org.

FamilySearch president, Jay Verkler, says that this is the result of the Worldwide Indexing Project, and that they will add about 300-million more names to it.

He said "the flow of names to the Web will continue as The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints seeks to index all of the approximately 3.5-billion names stored on microfilm in the Granite Mountain Records Vault. It will take about 10 years to index all the records, a task previously projected to take more than a century to complete."

I spent this afternoon putting in the names of my genealogy, and although nothing was added to my search, there are million of names left to go, so the BARCLAYs, HALEYs, WEBSTERs, MORTONs and so on will show up somewhere in time, I am sure.