Fun Facts About FamilySearch
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FamilySearch has the largest collection of free genealogy records on the internet thanks to the dedicated work of thousands of volunteers. With the latest large release of 72 million records last week, FamilySearch has reached a very important milestone. Volunteers have now transcribed over 500 million genealogy records online.
We thought we would celebrate this important milestone by compiling some fun and interesting genealogy statistics about FamilySearch (courtesy of FamilySearch and Alexa the internet traffic people):
History
- FamilySearch was launched in May 1999.
- There are now a total of over 1 billion names in the database.
Volunteers
- The year 2006 was when the FamilySearch indexing project really took off. That year the volunteer indexing project was migrated to the web (previously, it was a CD-ROM based system).
- Since 2006, a total of 548 million records have been indexed by volunteers via the web interface.
- There are 127,000 active volunteers.
- The average volunteer indexes 2,169 records.
- Each record is double keyed (two people independently enter each record; any discrepancies go to a third person for arbitration).
New Records
- A total of 186 million new records alone were added in 2010.
- There are currently 100+ different index projects in progress from around the world.
- Records are now indexed in 11 languages (Portuguese and Polish were added in 2010).
Users
- FamilySearch gets over 50,000 visitors per day.
- The average visitor to FamilySearch looks at about 20 pages.
- Each record on the website has been viewed an average of 5 times.
- A total of 1.2% of all global internet users visit FamilySearch (by comparison Ancestry, the largest genealogy website, is visited by 7.1% of all internet users).
- About 77% of visitors go to the main website and around 16% of visitors go to the pilot website. Just 6% of visitors go to the lab website.
- FamilySearch has over 1 million registered users.
You can view a list of the latest ancestry records from FamilySearch and other genealogy websites here.
