By Steve Fidel
Deseret News staff writer

      LDS Church officials on Saturday announced the release of new computer products designed to ease genealogical work and make historical records more widely available.

Elder Monte J. Brough, director of the LDS Church's Family History Department, holds SourceGuide CD-ROM. Paul Barker, Deseret News

      Included in the release is a CD-ROM collection of approximately 1.5 million records from the 1851 British Census and a computer program designed as a resource for international genealogical research.
      The LDS Church is widely known for its unmatched genealogical program and equally unmatched collection of genealogical records, a collection that has been growing since 1894.
      "We have the largest collection of genealogical records that exists anywhere," said Elder Monte L. Brough, director of the Family History Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. "In the past you would have to come to a (church) Family History Library, like the one here in Salt Lake City" to research the records, he said.
      The new software follows the release of earlier programs designed to help LDS Church members compile their own family history, said Elder Russell M. Nelson in the afternoon session of the church's General Conference.
      Saturday's announcement marks the beginning of a series of upcoming releases that will make additional sets of genealogical records available, Elder Brough said.
      The initial CD-ROM including 1851 census records from Devon, Norfolk and Warwick counties in Great Britain is being sold for $5. The Family History SourceGuide software sells for $20. "It is a significant product at a very low cost," he said. "Tens of thousands of copies" have been produced for the initial release.
      Also available from the church are 4.8 million records in the Australian Vital Records Index. Soon to be released are the full 1881 British Census, the 1880 U.S. Census and 25 million records from vital record indexes for the British Isles and the United States and Canada.
      Elder Brough said surveys show 20 percent of the content of the Internet relates to genealogy and that 54 percent of Americans are interested in their genealogy but many do not know how to go about researching it.
      Despite the proliferation of personal computers, Elder Nelson encouraged exploration by those who "hope they can slip through their remaining days on earth without ever having touched a computer."
      The Family History SourceGuide is the first automated Windows-run product to compile more than 150 research guides now in use at the church's Family History Library in Salt Lake. Product manager Steve Fox said using the software is "like having your very own reference librarian in the convenience of your home."
      Users can type in a place where an ancestor lived and the kind of information they want to research — birthday and place, marriage, adoption, occupation, immigration, military and living relative information. The software then shows information about the types of records and sources needed to find those records.
      The software allows users to print blank forms and census work sheets and has researching guides including maps and lists of words in several languages commonly found on vital records.
      "This is the first time we've automated knowledge about how to do genealogy," Fox said.
      Family History SourceGuide is intended for home use, but Fox believes the product will be popular with public libraries and other research institutions.
      The SourceGuide will run on Pentium computers with a CD-ROM drive running Windows 95 or Windows NT 4.0 or higher. Census CD-ROMs will run on the same platform, and on computers running Windows 3.1.
      To order the new products or for more information, call 1-800-537-5950 in the United States and Canada.