New Ways to Dig For Your Roots Online

 

Today, Ancestry.com, a subscription service owned by MyFamily.com Inc., will put a fully indexed version of the 1910 U.S. Census on the Web, culminating its six-year-long project of digitizing and indexing all publicly available U.S. Census records from 1790 to 1930.  This effort means users can now search all publicly available U.S. censuses for ancestors' names, ages, birthplaces and places of residence.  They can also discover other facts such as addresses, home values and occupations by viewing a digital image of the handwritten original document.

 

In recent months, FamilySearch.org, a free site sponsoed by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has been expanding its collection of birth, marriage, death, census and other records.  It has also begun a massive project to digitize billions of records previously available only on microfiilm, particularly civil, church and local records.  It plans to make those available online beginning early next year.  At the same time, a new genealogy search tool from MyHeritage Ltd., a free service based in Israel, is allowing consumers to simply search across hundreds of genealogy databases at once.  These databases include everything from lists of passengers kept by ships transporting immigrants to war casualty records and photo archives.

 

While family-history aficionados have for years been able to hunt down batches of records (often with the help of subscription-only services available through libraries and schools), new services put such sources right at consumers fingertips and in one place.  FamilySearch.org, a free site, says its recent efforts to digitize billions of reels of microfilm will allow consumers to access sources from their desk.  Previously, the site could often only tell users how to find the relevant microfilm. 

 

While tradtional online genealogy queries often only pulled up a name, birth and death date and location, the new results are much richer and include more arcane trivia from chruch registries, cemetery records and even agrarian censuses (revealing how many pigs and chickens one's relatives may have owned). 

 

In April, Stephen Danko's quest to hunt down his grandfathers' World War II "Old Man's Draft Cards," documents revealing his ancestors' ages, dates and places of birth along with their hair colors, eye colors, heights and weights, required him to take a trip from San Francisco to a Salt Lake City archive to find them on microfilm.  A few weeks after he returned he noticed the same documents online on Ancestry.com.  "I can find stuff online all the time that I couldn't when I started," says Mr. Danko, a 52-year-old pharmaceutical-company employee.

 

New technologies and plummeting digital storage costs are enabling companies to put more sources directly online.  Ancestry.com's massive batch of census records is housed in a 3,400-square-foot data center in Utah that contains 3,400 servers.  Such an investment was possibly only because such digital storage costs have been continuing to fall, say Tim Sullivan, Ancestry.com's chief executive.

Cameras that take higher-resolution pictures and that can automatically correct for blemishes like watermarks mean that FamilySearch.org can do "in minutes what used to take hours and days," says the organization's chief marketing officer Steve Anderson.  New technologies that can recognize the type of document being scanned and highligh various fields for indexing are helping, too.

Preservation efforts are part of a massive global effort to digitize a variety of content for safekeeping and easy searching, such as Google Inc.'s effort to scan libraries of books.  Online genealogy companies say that last year's devastating hurricane season, which destroyed several archives in the South, has also increased demand for partnership programs in which they digitize local archives in exchange for being able to offer the sources to the public through their sites.  

Online genealogy companies are hoping that the new content and tools will give them a second wind as the online genealogy market begins to mature.  In 2003, the last year for which the data is available, the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 24% of Internet users researched their family history or genealogy online.  But in the past few years, traffic at genealogy Web sites has begun dropping.  Nine million people visited online genealogy Web sites last month, down from 10.5 million in May of 2005, according to comScore Networks Inc., a research firm.

 

Companies are also branching out to include more international records.  Ancestry.com recently launched Ancestry.co.uk, which will help its U.S. market by allowing Americans to trace those with English roots further back, the company says.  Ancestry.com has been adding international sources to its U.S. site as well.  In April, the company completed an online version of the 1841 United Kingdom Census and has plans to add German, Italian and Australia databases soon.

 

MyHeritage Research, which is available through MyHeritage.com, allows consumers to type in an ancestor's name and then search simultaneously across more than 400 databases from around the world such as Ireland's Gravestone Index and soldier records from the U.S. Civil War.

 
The flood of new content means that family history hunters are more likely than ever to find a match.  But there are still holes and errors.  While researching his family's New England roots on Familysearch.org, Dick Eastman, a 60-year-old support engineer for an online software firm from Northborough, Mass., was searching for information on ancestors and was given two different locations for what appeared to be the same relatives: one record had them living in Massachusetts, the other in Maine.

 

And consumers won't have much luck tracing recent family history due to federal government policies that limit the data it discloses about people who may be living.  While Ancestry.com can put the complete records of World War I draft cards online, for example, when it comes to World War II cards, they can only release the Old Man's Draft Cards, since the databases covered the older demographic of 45- to 64-year-olds who are less likely to be living today.

 

Companies are also adding new categories of publicly available sources.  In July, Ancestry.com plans to put a collection of photographs from the Library of Congress online.  The photos, mostly dating from 1840 to 1940, include images of places, people and events culled from sources like newspapers.