Real Neat Information on Family History Research

It was done already. That's why Sean Sullivan, 57, never did much family history, until the Provo resident discoverd he was related to Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain. Sean Sullivan made the connection on Relative Finder, a free Facebook application that uses data from FamilySearch.org to show how users are related to friends and famous people Since then, he has spent hours, logging 40 hours in one week, digesting ancestor research online. This year family history viewers have topped 149 million, based on website statistics from Compete.com, as users, typically aged 45 and older, seek out connections to relatives.

More than 100 million records will be made available this year via companies like Salt Lake City based FamilySearch International, owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Provo based Ancestry.com Inc and Palo Alto, California based Archives.com. Part time ancestral sleuths are turning to the internet to find their progenitors, with companies trying to keep up with a growing market. "Stuff keeps changing on FamilySearch almost daily, "Sullivan said. "You go back today and look at a family line, you may find it goes back deeper than it was last week, or even yesterday. For some reason I hadn't tapped into it before." With more interest in the market, there is a scramble to gather content in order to keep up with the growth. This has even led to major partnerships, including FamilySearch partnering with Ancestry to digitize the content in the LDS church's Granite Mountain Records Vault, where only 20 percent of the 4 billion records have been digitized.

FamilySearch's total searchable names have risen 15 percent to 2.3 billion this year, after a 54 percent jump in 2010. FamilySearch will open its third data center in Kansas City. The 63,000 square foot building will house computer servers that contain digitized documents. The site also allows users to share findings, adding a social aspect that enhances the searching experience and ensure the names in their family tree are accurate. Only 10 percent of the site's visitors are members of the LDS church. The vast mahority of the records of the world are still offline and are not searchable by computers as yet. Familysearch's name indexing uses 125,000 volunteers which are able to do the indexing 40 times faster than previously was done.