Genealogy and History Fan

The Family History Library (FHL), of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints,(Mormons, LDS) has the world’s largest collection of genealogical records. The library is located in downtown Salt Lake City, Utah. It was founded in 1894 but the current facility was built in 1985. The building is 5 floors with 142,000 square feet. It houses 2.4 million microfilm rolls, 742,000 microfiche, 310,000 books, and 4,500 periodicals. There are over 2 billion records of deceased people on databases. All of these records and more are available free of charge. The library averages about 2,500 visitors daily and is open 72 hours weekly on most weeks.

If all of this is not great enough, Ancestry.com, has recently teamed up with the FHL to provide free access of their records to library patrons. Thirteen (of the 3400+) Family History Centers will also offer this service. These 13 centers are some of the largest regional centers. The centers are in California at Los Angeles, Oakland, Orange, Sacramento and San Diego; in Idaho at Idaho Falls and Pocatello; in Utah at Logan, Ogden and St. George. Also included are Mesa Arizona, Las Vegas Nevada as well as Hyde Park in London England.

Ancestry.com began in 1997 and has grown steadily to become the number one online genealogy site. It has over 24,000 databases, including 5 billion names with family history records. Ancestry has the only complete online U.S. Federal Census collection (1790-1930). They also have the largest online collection of U.S. ship passenger lists, military records and African American records.

Visitors to the FHL or selected Centers will now have an even greater opportunity to be successful in researching their family history.

“If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday.”

Pearl S. Buck (1892-1973)