1 billion records to be digitised

Great news for genealogists! There has been an announcement this week that Ancestry.com and FamilySearch have come to an agreement to digitise over 1 billion records from FamilySearch’s Granite Mountain vaults. Over the past seven years volunteers around the world have been indexing and digitizing the LDS Church’s vast collection of genealogical records, and on April 19, 2013 they reached the phenomenal “1 billion” searchable records mark, that have been added to the FamilySearch.org website.

While new records are being digitised and are going online straight away, FamilySearch has a collection of over 2.4 million rolls of microfilm containing photographic images of historical documents from 110 countries. It is literally going to take years to get these all online and digitised, let alone indexed as well, so this new agreement with Ancestry.com will speed-up the whole process. This agreement proposes that Ancestry.com and FamilySearch will increasingly share international sets of records more collaboratively, however financial and administrative details have not been released. You can read more in the Ancestry.com press release and Salt Lake City’s “Deseret News” newspaper.