The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and others in communities around the world are discovering their ancestors with the help of an ever-increasing abundance of resources from the Church-sponsored FamilySearch, the largest non-profit genealogical organization in the world.
Family History Research
Through its network of 4,715 family history centres in 132 countries, people tracing their family trees can access — for free — billions of names collected over decades from birth, marriage and death certificates, censuses, wills and other records. Canada has 164 family history centres in various locations across the country.
FamilySearch is continuously seeking technological advances to aid in digitally preserving and making records accessible to the public online. For example, more than 250 digital record preservation camera teams are directed by FamilySearch in 45 countries to produce more than 100 million new digital images for free online use each year. FamilySearch plans to expand the number of camera teams to 500 in 2014.
FamilySearch.org’s database already allows access to over three billion family records from 110 countries.
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Stories, Photos and Other Information: Preserving and Collaborating
In 2013 the organization launched its Family Tree and Memories features to help people everywhere collaborate on their family trees online and to personally preserve and share more family memories through photos and stories of their ancestors.
The new Memories feature allows users to easily upload and manage family photos online and to tell their favourite ancestor stories. With photos, faces can be identified and linked to the respective ancestors’ profiles in a user’s family tree, ensuring they will be accessible for future generations. Photos and stories can also be seamlessly shared via Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest and email.
Every user of Family Tree can upload as many as 5,000 photos (five megabyte-per-image limit), and each story can be up to 100 pages long. Family Tree also enables individuals to collaborate online to build and manage their shared family history.
At Church family history centres in North America, a recently implemented family photo scanning service allows participants to log in to their free FamilySearch account and digitally upload family photos and historic documents to an online folder. They can then leisurely connect the photos and documents to ancestors in their FamilySearch Family Tree. Patrons can also save images of the scanned documents and photos to personal flash drives.