This is the info and FAQ page for the enormously popular LDS Family History Internet site, familysearch.org

Q: What info do we have at this time on this site?

A: The site went online 31 March 1999. It is at this link. After a two-month test period a formal press conference was held in May of 1999. That day, nearly all the major news organizations put coverage of the formal opening of the site on the news or put it in newspapers and magazines.

Later that day, the site got so swamped that they had to take the server down to increase the capacity and they estimate that they took 100 million hits but were only able to server 40 million or so. LavaStorm, the company that assisted the Church in putting together the site, added a timer to even out the load, which disappeared after the initial week or so.

No one had ever seen any website have this much traffic on its opening day, not even large commercial sites. Some say it is now the top .org website on the net now.

The site currently serves up between 8 and 10 million hits a day.

Q: What is currently on the site?

A: The following currently is listed as being on the site:

• The Ancestral File
• The International Genealogical Index (all regions, without the ordinance dates).
• The Family History Library Catalog
• Collaboration lists (like mailing lists), of which there are now nearly 90,000.
• The Family History Source Guide (searchable).
• Links to many other websites, found via searches.
• Other search features, more advanced than those on the CD-ROM version at your local FHC.
• 'Preserve your Genealogy', where you can submit GEDCOM files for printing on a CD-ROM, thus preserving your data as of that moment. You can add to the data or change wrong data by sending in another submission via this feature as well.

LavaStorm, the site creator for the LDS Church, said that there is now about one terabyte of data on the site as of 15 March 2000. That is about one-twentieth of all the data that presently exists on the entire World Wide Web!

Q: What can we expect in the future?

A: They have placed an index to the Pedigree Resource File, an index to some new CD-ROM databases that have lineage-linked data, separate from the Ancestral File but provided by users of familysearch.org. they presently get 1 million names plus notes and data every month, that is about as much as is needed to fill a CD.

As of 15 March 2000, the site has the index to the first seven CDs online. For more info on the Pedigree Resource file, visit my FAQ at this link

Links related to this FAQ.