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Whether your LDS ancestors pulled a handcart across the Plains or you
have no affiliation with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints, there's a wealth of information being processed for placement
on the Internet beginning next year that can tie you to your family
tree free.
 Jeffrey D. Allred, Deseret Morning News Visitors to Temple Square walk past the LDS temple before conference weekend begins.
But relatively few know all of what's now available to help fill
out their family tree, including archives that chronicle the early
history of the LDS Church in exacting and often personal detail.
And with a complete overhaul of the church's FamilySearch.org
Web site planned for the months ahead, even those who have no
experience researching family history will be able to "do something
meaningful without having to learn anything prior," according to Steve
W. Anderson, online marketing manager for the church's Family History
department.
New online tools will allow novices to log on and with a few
mouse clicks pull up their family tree, with details about ancestors,
of any faith or none, that are part of the database. "You'll be able to
attach images or photos to it, or something like a timeline of events.
It will have all kind of things to make it a much richer resource."
Users will have their own login, allowing them to add information
about living people to their family tree if they so choose, though that
information will not be available for others to view in order to
maintain privacy. Anderson said there is some concern about the
accuracy of allowing people to simply add information, but "if someone
disagrees with your account of it, there will be an opportunity to put
additional information or opinion there."
In addition to the redesigned Web site, the church is pushing
forward with a digitizing project that will eventually allow the images
of such information as census records, birth, death, marriage, tax and
land records now contained on its 2.4 million rolls of microfilm to
not only be placed online, but to be indexed in order to allow nearly
instant access.
The project is estimated to take from five to 15 years to
complete. After that anyone looking for access to literally billions of
individual documents will be able to search for them in minutes online.
In the past, the only way to access those records was to order a copy
of the microfilm through the mail.
"We're trying to make the information much more accessible and
also much more meaningful," Anderson said. "The Web has made us all a
little attention-challenged, yet we all flock to it. All that we're
doing here with online programs and databases puts us right at
the doorstep of a mountain of significant change."
The church is currently working with thousands of volunteers
worldwide to help index the digitized records many of them through
state and local genealogical societies. Public access to selected
records that have been both digitized and indexed is anticipated
"fairly soon definitely by next year," he said.
Family History communications and planning manager Paul Nauta
said the indexing technology is "coming along nicely" at this point,
and managers will begin testing the indexing internally through church
groups and with selected genealogical societies nationally who have
volunteers now working to index records that their memberships find
valuable.
The project, dubbed "FamilySearch Indexing," is drawing growing
interest from volunteers in a variety of areas. A demonstration of the
new technology will be featured at the Ogden Regional Family History
Conference Oct. 6-7 at the Eccles Conference Center during a
presentation called "Opening the Granite Mountain Vault." (For
information, see www.myancestorsfound.com/NorthUtah/highlights.htm)
 Jeffrey D. Allred, Deseret Morning News Ken
Holady of Milton-Freewater, Ore., views paintings by Robert Marshall
and Shauna Cook Clinger at "Willie and Martin Remembered: A Tribute to
the Mormon Handcart Pioneers" exhibit Friday at the Museum of Church
History and Art.
Volunteers range from beginners to experienced researchers, he
said, because the workload has been processed into manageable bits
meaning volunteers can spend only 30 minutes at any one time and feel a
sense of accomplishment.
He said it's difficult to estimate how long it will take to index
millions of records covering a 150 year span, but he's estimating it
will be 36 months. As enthusiasm builds, "it wouldn't surprise me if it
took less than half that time," he said.
Errors are bound to occur, but should be caught because the
system is designed so every record is in entered twice by two
different people working independently of each other. If one record
disagrees with the other, an arbitrator will decide which one is
correct.
Amy Johnson Crowe with the Ohio Genealogical Society said the
church approached her group more than two years ago about volunteering,
even before the project began. They've been working on an index for
Ohio tax records already digitized by the church since December. She
dubbed the project "mind-boggling," saying when people hear about it,
"they usually want to get involved. It's so incredible from what we
thought was possible only a couple of years ago. ... There is a lot of
excitement about this."
As online access grows exponentially, information about early
Latter-day Saints and details of their lives that may otherwise have
been lost is readily available, some of it online.
For example, the Mormon Pioneer Overland Travel database can be found at lds.org
under the "church history" tab, and provides names, dates and even
journal entries about Latter-day Saints who came by wagon team or
handcart to the Salt Lake Valley, as well as a complete list of sources
some of them full-text.
While the church's Family History Library is known worldwide, the
less-frequently-used Church History Library, now housed inside the east
wing on the main floor of the Church Office Building, offers
information not available elsewhere.
Holdings in the Church History Library have grown so large that a
250,000-square-foot building is now under construction west of the
Conference Center to house them all, along with administrative offices.
Brent Thompson, director of records preservation, said most of
the site excavation for the structure is complete, and concrete was
poured earlier this week for the initial part of the foundation.
Workers have also tunneled under North Temple to provide eventual
access to the Church Office Building. Construction is on target to be
completed next year, but Thompson said it likely won't be ready for
public use until 2008.
Anderson said the combined initiative to expand public access to
ancestral information is "huge. Together they represent probably the
most significant changes in family history work ever undertaken."
E-mail: carrie@desnews.com
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