Wikipedia

FamilySearch - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "this family history website is provided by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It provides its resources free of charge to the public and is one of the most heavily used genealogy sites on the Internet.[citation needed]"

History of the website

• May 1999: Website first opened to the public. It almost immediately went off-line; overloaded due to extreme popularity.
• October 1999: Surpassed 1.5 billion hits.
• November 1999: 240 million names added, bringing the total number of entries to 640 million.^[1]
• November 2005: New FamilySearch.org enters first Beta test.
• February 2007: New FamilySearch.org enters Beta 2 testing.
• June 2007: New FamilySearch.org is now live for some areas.
• November 2007: limited rollout and access to new.familysearch.org
• November 2007: Current public site is still www.familysearch..org

The Family History Library (FHL) is in the process of digitizing its entire microfilm collection using ScanStone, a hardware and software system developed by the LDS Church to rapidly create digital images of genealogical records contained on microfilm. When fully implemented, the FHL will be able to convert 370,000 rolls of microfilm per year into digital images. It is estimated that the digitizing project will be completed about 2012.^[3]

An online index to the digitized records is also being created using FamilySearch Indexing software developed by the LDS Church. The church hopes to recruit hundreds of thousands of volunteers to complete the indexing project. Volunteers can participate by going to the Church's FamilySearch Indexing web site. Some of the databases containing the digital images and indexes can be viewed at http://Labs.FamilySearch.org, and will eventually be added to the FamilySearch website.

FamilySearch.org - News: "Official news releases from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints"

RootsMagic Blog » RootsMagic 4 Unwrapped - New FamilySearch: "Currently New FamilySearch is being released in phases to members of the LDS Church, but eventually free access will also be available to the general public. RootsMagic is a FamilySearch Affiliate, and RootsMagic 4 will be a FamilySearch Certified application when it is released later this year.

RootsMagic 4 will let you easily match up individuals in your database with the matching person out on New FamilySearch. This way RootsMagic can notify you when someone else changes information on that person out on New FamilySearch. It also makes it easy to copy information back and forth between RootsMagic and New FamilySearch."