FamilySearch and GenealogyBank made a major announcement on 1 October 2014 that
will bring 1 billion searchable obituaries to FamilySearch.
Genealogy researchers know that obituaries are a key resource in finding and proving information about their ancestors. In many cases, they provide family and personal information that isn’t found in any other written record.
The obituaries are taken from newspapers from all 50 U.S. states and cover 1730 to the present day. FamilySearch notes that the completed index will include 85% of U.S. deaths from the last decade alone.
The success of the obituaries project depends on FamilySearch Indexing Volunteers. The sheer size of the collection would be daunting for most organizations to index but thanks to the thousands of FamilySearch volunteer indexers, the indexing should proceed relatively quickly.
Researchers need to help with the indexing of the collection. FamilySearch is providing the hosting and indexing resources. GenealogyBank is providing the obituary images. The genealogy community is to provide the indexing labor to share our part of the costs to put this huge collection online for free access by everyone.
Learn more about indexing at FamilySearch here.
Posted 1 Oct 2014 by Lee R. Drew on Lineagekeeper’s Genealogy Blog
0 comments:
Post a Comment