Online Family Tree
Mormon Site Is Online Family Tree - By KRISTEN MOULTON - AP
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) - Did your ancestors include pioneers or immigrants,
villains or soldiers, princesses or tailors? A Web site that officially kicks off Monday
and offers access to the largest collection of genealogical data in the world may help you
find out. The site, put up by the Mormon church, contains links to 400 million names
of people who lived dated back to 1500 - many with family pedigree charts. The Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' will add millions more names later this year from its
records on 2 billion dead people.
Cyndi Howell of Puyallup, Wash., creator of a popular index of genealogical Web
sites, says the new site is ``a real boon to genealogy. It's like bringing Disneyland into
your home.'' The Web site has been accessible since it began testing on April 1,
with improvements made along the way. Church President Gordon B. Hinckley will formally
unveil the site and roll out an improved version Monday in Salt Lake City.
Even before the kinks were worked out, the site was a hit. The test site
received 2 million visits on its first day, as many as the next most popular genealogical
Web site gets in a month, and has had more than 7 million hits per day ever since.
That ranks it among the top 80 places on the Web, said Alex Dunn, president of LavaStorm,
the Boston company that developed software for the site.
``The church has done for genealogy what Amazon has done for books on the
Internet. It's revolutionized it,'' Dunn said. For more than a century, the Mormon
church has dispatched members throughout the world to hand-copy and later photograph and
microfilm parish and civil records. The records, now all on microfilm, are stored in a
granite vault in the Wasatch Mountains 25 miles southeast of Salt Lake, and copies are at
the Mormon Family History Library near the temple downtown.
The church's goal is to help members find names of ancestors to baptize by
proxy, an ordinance that Mormons believe gives the dead the opportunity to embrace the
faith in the afterlife. ``We thought the Internet would be a major step forward in
making it easier, especially for members, but for everyone involved in family history, to
collaborate,'' said Elder D. Todd Christofferson, executive director of the church's
Family History Department.
The site also has what amounts to a card catalog to the church's Family History
Library - everything from immigrant ship passenger lists to homestead records to births
and deaths. To verify their online research, users can look at microfilm of the original
records at the library here or by ordering a copy at one of the church's 3,200 Family
History Centers worldwide.
Christofferson said the church uses an army of volunteers to screen other
genealogy Web sites, and the search engine will look in 4,000 of those as well as in
church sources.
Lee Caldwell, director of Internet technology strategy at IBM, which is hosting
the Web site on its computer servers in Chicago, predicted the site will become one of the
``top three or four sites on the Internet in terms of the number of people hitting it on
an ongoing basis.''
Caldwell said the site could make a fortune, but the Mormon church will not
accept advertising, and access to the genealogical data is free.
NOTE - The genealogical site can be found at www.familysearch.org
