Users would benefit by first checking with other family members about family history and then building a family tree at Ancestry.com, he said. The company's systems then can search through its more than 5 billion names and 23,000 searchable databases to find possible ancestor matches.

The passenger list records complement the existing U.S. Census information already offered at the Web site by "filling out the texture of the stories" of ancestors and creating "a linkage of their history in the United States with their history of their country of origin," he said.

"The federal census, at the end of the day, is a survey at an arbitrary point in time, but a passenger list represents a moment that marks one of the more important, if not the most important, events in the lives of our ancestors, which is that day of that journey they took from Germany or England or Italy or Belgium to the United States," Sullivan said. "In many ways, it's a memorial to the journey and the decision our ancestors undertook to come to this country."

Loretto Dennis Szucs, executive editor of Ancestry Magazine and author of "They Became Americans" and "Ellis Island: Tracing Your Family History Through America's Gateway," said, "Perhaps no other collection of records better illustrates the lure of America."

"Each one of us has been touched in some way by the experiences, choices, attitudes and the genetic makeup of our immigrant ancestors," Szucs said in a prepared statement. "Now Ancestry.com has made it possible for us to sit behind a computer screen, reach back in time and get to know these people who contributed so much of the lifestyle that we enjoy today."

In addition to the searchable index, the collection features 7 million images of passenger list records and about 1,000 images of the actual ships used by the travelers. "It's not just a database or index and not just images," Sullivan said. "The link between the two makes our service so powerful."

The three-year, $100 million project involved acquiring microfilm records in the public domain, digitizing and indexing the information and building the technology to display that information and make it searchable online. The passenger list records join Ancestry.com's collections of census, birth, marriage, military and death records and photographs.

Ancestry.com has more than 725,000 subscribers, who pay as little as $12.99 per month for a one-year contract. The MyFamily.com group of Web sites has a total of about 800,000.

Ancestry.com members will have access to the passenger list records at no additional cost, but access to the new collection will be offered free to everyone through November.

"It's the largest collection we've ever made totally free for such an extended time," Sullivan said. "I think it will catch a lot of people's interest that have not, until now, been interested in family history research."

The company has more than 250 people working in Utah in corporate duties, plus another 150 in shorter-term capacities and in the company's call center.

"We're very much a home-grown Utah business," Sullivan said, "and we're very proud of the technology that we've been able to build in Utah that is unmatched anywhere and lets us do the things we do for people."

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E-mail: bwallace@desnews.com