The NGS conference is being held in Salt Lake City this week and FamilySearch President Jay Verkler said 300 million more names will be available online this week through the LDS Church’s family history service.

The church’s Worldwide Indexing project, created mostly by volunteers digitize images of microfilmed records from the Mormon collection of microfilm and transcribe the records so they can be indexed and searched easily online by people at home.

This addition of 300 million names adds to a few hundred million indexed names that are already accessible.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has plans to index all of the approximately 3.5 billion names stored on microfilm.  It will take about 10 years to index all of the records, a task previously projected to take more than a century to complete.

The new search site is in beta and may be searched from home now at: http://fsbeta.familysearch.org/

The original search utility may be found at: http://familysearch.org/

These new additions to the name index are primarily from the United States and Europe.  I tested a few from some of my known German areas and am finding many new opportunities for further research.

Personally, I like the search index very much, but find the gold is in the library catalog.  On any new project I always go to familysearch.org and click on “Library” and then click on the “Library Catalog” tab in the drop down menu, then go to either:
Place Search
Surname Search
Keyword Search
Film/Fiche Search
Author search
Subject Search, or
Call Number Search.

These choices will tell you what microfilms they have on your topic of choice and then you can order the original records on microfilm to be delivered to your own local Family History Center.

Thank you volunteers!

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