Shaking the family tree

The Mormon Church takes its vast database online -- and gives the genealogy world a charge.

By Kaitlin Quistgaard

Apr 14, 1999 | When it comes to genealogical resources, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has the goods. Records for more than 2 billion names are stored in its Salt Lake City library -- and now that the church's FamilySearch Web site has begun beta testing, some of that trove is coming online.

The Internet already offers lots of resources for amateur family-tree sleuths. But what the church has is a one-of-a-kind collection of the sort of hard documentation that professional genealogists demand. And even the possibility that its data might be made available online for free has the genealogy world abuzz -- and holds the potential to turn a much larger population of Web surfers on to the pleasures of hunting down bloodlines.

"This is what we've been waiting for," says Cyndi Howell, genealogist and publisher of Cyndi's List, a collection of more than 41,700 links to genealogy sites on the Web. FamilySearch isn't slated for a full unveiling until late spring or early summer. But already, visitors to the site can poke around in church databases -- like the Ancestral File, with 35 million names organized by family, or the International Genealogical Index, with 285 million names extracted from public records. For the lucky, that could mean finding quick proof that the family tree branches right back to the Mayflower, or to Great-uncle Alistair's illegitimate daughter.

The church won't yet say how much of its genealogical holdings it plans to make available through FamilySearch. The secrecy, church spokesman Michael Purdy says, is just a way to keep people's expectations in check. "There had been a lot of speculation" even before the site went live, Purdy adds, but for now the church will not confirm even the most basic information -- like whether the invaluable site will remain free of charge.

Still, excitement is rampant among genealogists. "It's really breathtaking," says Tom Kemp, library director at the New England Historic Genealogical Society, who began tinkering with the site as soon as it went up. He is especially impressed with its ability to search several enormous databases simultaneously: "It's going to change the way we do business."

You might not see why at first: The church has already gone to great lengths to make its collection available to the public, operating 3,200 Family History Centers around the world. Anyone can visit a center and search the church's CD-ROM collection at no charge, or send away for one of its 2.1 million rolls of microfilm (each of which contains about 1,000 pages of records) for a nominal mailing fee. The church offers other data on CDs free of charge.

"Serious genealogists already use this data all the time," says Charles Merrin, senior director of online genealogy at the Learning Company, which sells the popular Family Tree Maker software. He says putting the church's collection online "is just a matter of convenience" for amateur researchers -- but, he adds, that alone should have a huge impact on the field.

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