FamilySearch.org

Since the early 1900's, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has been actively working to preserve the world's genealogical records. Their benevolent efforts are the result of a deep-seated sense of connection to one's ancestors as a result of their religious doctrine. Fortunately for the rest of the world, their efforts have resulted in the collection, preservation, documentation, and distribution of billions of individual historical records. This is done through their genealogical arm called FamilySearch.

Familysearch.org provides services for both beginners & experienced professionals in the field of family history and genealogy research. Their site is free and anyone can sign up and use their services. They provide online access to millions of records.

Perhaps one of the best features of FamilySearch.org is online access to their catalog of millions of micro-filmed, micro-fiched and published records that are currently held at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah. The actual micro-copied records can be mailed to any local family history center for only the cost of postage, and can be kept for varying lengths of time. This material can be searched by place, name, keyword, title, film or fiche number, author, subject or call number of printed material. FamilySearch.org does not offer many original documents online but can connect you to some records on Ancestry.com for a fee if you find someone of interest in their indexes.

In order to keep their services free, FamilySearch.org relies on the generous contributions of the member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Additionally, they rely on a vast network of volunteer Indexers who essentially crowd-source the record digitization process. When the 1940 census was released in 2012, they were able to complete the indexing process in approximately 3 months through mostly volunteer efforts.

Anyone who has done, intends to do, or may benefit from genealogy and family history work should be grateful for the huge value being provided by the LDS church through FamilySearch.org. Their efforts have pushed many family trees back further than otherwise would have been possible as many of the records they preserved early on have since been destroyed except for their digital copies.

Unfortunately, FamilySearch.org still doesn't automatically match individual in your family tree to those in other family trees, meaning much of the work that is done there is duplicated. It has been estimated that up to 80% of all genealogy work is duplicate effort of work that has already been done. At OneGreatFamily.com, we are striving to eliminate this duplication of genealogical effort to allow everyone to get past the repeat work and get focused on areas that have yet to be completed. We do this by automatically matching individuals on submitted trees to duplicates on other trees and then merging those exact duplicates together. By removing duplicates, everyone benefits.

Using FamilySearch.org and OneGreatFamily.com together can get you the best of both worlds. Start your Free 7-Day Trial today!