11 January 2018
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FamilySearch genealogy website
FamilySearch has issued a round-up of its highlights for 2017, which include reaching 1.2 billion ancestors within its database, and welcoming 27 million new ancestor records to its website.
The non-profit family history giant added hundreds of millions of free historical websites to the FamilySearch website, and its drive to encourage genealogy collaboration paid off, with 27 million new ancestors added to its database, bringing the total number of names to 1.2 billion.
The year 2017 also saw an increase in the number of people using FamilySearch from a mobile platform, with 3.7 million of the new names added via mobile devices. A system upgrade also enables users to merge duplicate records of large or extremely common family lines.
Access to new historical records
Some 283 million new searchable names were added to FamilySearch last year, bringing the total number of searchable names to 5.9 billion. And users can also freely browse more than 340 million images of historic books and records added during 2017.
The organisation also discontinued its 80-year era of historic records access to usher in a new, digital model, with the long-term of digitising all of its records.
New FamilySearch features
Two new features introduced to the FamilySearch website are Map Your Ancestors, which creates a map of locations where events took place in the life of ancestors in a FamilySearch family tree, and Relatives Around Me, which allows users to see if and how they are related to others around them who are using the feature.
Explore FamilySearch's millions of records on the FamilySearch website.