Another revolution in genealogy

When Derek Dobson speaks to LDS seminary classes, he talks revolution.

Dobson is the family-search indexing-product manager for the LDS Church's Family History Department. He tells the teens about the invention of the printing press and how that revolution made the Bible available to the world.

He tells them about the invention of microfilm and how the 1930s saw the beginning of their church's archival collection in the Granite Mountain Vault.

And finally, Dobson announces, excitedly, "We are about to go through another revolution." Using the Internet, from their homes or laptops, people around the world are about to have access to more documents than they ever dreamed possible.

Before the end of the year, the church's free genealogy Web site, familysearch.org, will have a new look. That's how users will know when the revolution Dobson speaks of has begun.

Rich Running, also a project manager for the church's Family History Department, is responsible for seeing that the church's genealogy records — more than 5 billion documents on 2 1/2 million rolls of microfilm and 1 1/2 million microfiche — are scanned.

Not everything in the Granite Mountain vaults in Little Cottonwood Canyon can be scanned. The LDS Church got these records from a variety of sources, some of which are archival companies that don't want their records published.

Still, the vast majority of the church's documents are reproducible, and right now the church's software experts need to scan quickly, because they have a lot to scan. Dobson explains that the U.S. Library of Congress contains 29 million books, and the LDS Church's records hold 132 times that much data. Dobson doesn't want to guess how many billions of names are on those 5 billion documents.

Of course, "searching through 5 billion images on your computer would not be an ideal experience," Dobson points out. The records must be indexed so that when a user types in a name, that name will pop up. This is where an army of volunteers comes in.

More than 25,000 volunteers are currently at work indexing the records. Running predicts there will be 100,000 volunteers by the end of this year and many hundreds of thousands in the years to come.