In what officials say will be a quantum leap forward in providing family history information online, the LDS Church has announced a plan designed to eventually help provide access to billions of genealogical records on the Web, in addition to the billions of records it is currently indexing out of its own Granite Vault microfilm archives.

The new Records Access program is being announced this week at the annual meeting of the National Genealogical Society (NGS) in Richmond, Va. The announcement details specifics of how the church is creating partnerships with various archives and other records depositories in a move to become the world's premier international "clearinghouse" for family history.

The first cooperative project under the new program will be to digitize and index U.S. Revolutionary War Pension records with the National Archives in Washington, meaning anyone with ancestors who served in that war will soon be able to access details about that family member online.

Steve W. Anderson, manager of marketing for the church's FamilySearch.org, said the church is working to arrange agreements with commercial Web sites and genealogical organizations worldwide to provide digitizing, indexing and online posting for billions of records, many of which have never been indexed at all, let alone been available online.

"Archives all have two things in mind: preservation and making records available," he said. "When push comes to shove, they would rather preserve them than share them, but most would like to do both."

The church is forming agreements with organizations to help film or digitally image their collections, which can be posted on an organization's Web site, as well as on FamilySearch.org. In some cases, FamilySearch will simply provide a link to a specific organization's Web site, where a small fee for access will be charged to view the records.

The program "recruits volunteers from around the world to index a batch of records at a time. They transcribe those pieces of information — names, dates, locations, marriage, death and birth dates — and make an index that allows the record to be searched by name or place or event," Anderson said.

The project not only will provide "vital statistics," but by imaging the documents, users will be able to pull up a digitized image of the actual record itself. "That's a whole different experience, to see an image of the original document," he said.