Family history research, which ranks among the Internet's most popular activities, gets a big boost Monday when the Mormon Church unveils its online database of 400 million names, a spokesman said.
The church, which encourages members to trace ancestors as a religious obligation, plans to publish a total of 600 million names by year-end on its new FamilySearch site, spokesman Richard Turley said.
The hundreds of millions of names of possible ancestors will draw from the motherlode of genealogy data -- the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' library in Salt Lake City -- and be available free of charge for church members and nonmembers alike.
The huge database is part of the world's largest genealogical repository -- the church's family history library in Salt Lake City, which boasts records of more than 2 billion names.
"Now anybody can jump on the Web and start to find information about their ancestors," said Dick Eastman, editor of Eastman's On-line Newsletter based in Nashua, New Hampshire, an independent review of online genealogy resources. "The world's largest archive is available at least at the catalog level."
In a statement, church elder D. Todd Christofferson, executive director of the family history department, said the intent of the site was to make family history research easier and more effective.
"This new genealogical search service will revolutionize the way people trace their roots on the Web," he said. "It has been an enormous undertaking," he said of the church's 30-year project to computerize ancestral records.
"We believe that family relationships can be eternal and by searching out our ancestors, we can begin to better understand who we are and what we may become," Christofferson said of the Mormon Church, which has 10.4 million members worldwide.
FamilySearch is church-subsidized. IBM is hosting the Web site and supplying the computer hardware necessary to operate it.
The FamilySearch Internet Genealogy Service is set to debut after an eight-week test demonstrated the site's popularity as word spread over the Internet and caused the Web site to crash, forcing the church to bolster computer capacity several times.
The service offers a search engine that hunts for specific names and ties throughout the church's ancestral file of 35 million names listed according to pedigree. It culls links from its international genealogical index of 360 million names from records in the United Kingdom, North America, and Finland.
FamilySearch also seeks out surnames among thousands of smaller genealogical Web sites that have been evaluated by church volunteers and catalogs research resources contained on more than 2 million rolls of microfilm at the church library.
The site includes many collaborative features that allow Internet users to share their research with others searching the same family lines.
Eastman, who is not a Mormon Church member, said the data was more international than anything available to date online. But he said genealogical research remains a confusing process of sifting through data of varying accuracy.
Even after the church's massive contribution, available data are drawn mostly from North America and the United Kingdom. The Mormons' records offer expanded Central and South American names, but records from Asia and Africa remain slim, he said.
FamilySearch aims to complement existing genealogy Web sites like Ancestry.com, an Orem, Utah-based site with a database of 240 million names, and Cyndi's List of Puyallup, Washington, which catalogs 41,700 Internet genealogy sites.
Beyond a massive collection of records at its Salt Lake City library, the Mormon Church operates more than 3,400 genealogy worldwide with links to the central library.
