With the help of Elder D. Todd Christofferson, left, Gordon B. Hinckley, president of the Mormon church, checks out his own family history on the church's new internet geneological web site Friday, May 21, 1999, in Salt Lake City, Utah. The noncommercial site, put up by the Mormon church to begin sharing its mother lode of genealogical data, will debut Monday. It is the biggest such database in the world. ASSOCIATED PRESS

Mormons put genealogy data online

The genealogy site, to launch Monday, will be the largest such site in the world

Web posted May 24, 1999

 Family Search Web Site

By Kristen Moulton
Associated Press

SALT LAKE CITY -- 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.

The genealogical site can be found at www.familysearch.org.