FamilySearch International's Review of 2019

FamilySearch International has published its Review of 2019 and highlights some of its acheivements during the year. Among the latter are its 125th anniversary as an organisation and the 20th anniversary of its website FamilySearch.org, for which all family historians have good reason to be grateful.

Since its establishment in a small upstairs office in Salt Lake City, Utah, as the Genealogical Society of Utah in 1894, it has become the world’s largest genealogy organization, now known as FamilySearch International.

In 2019, FamilySearch added 123 million name-searchable records and 832.5 million new images of historical records to its database. Additionally, nearly 7.6 million scanned images from published historical books were uploaded.

To make this vast collection of records easily searchable, 318,000 volunteers clocked 10.9 million indexing hours in 2019.

Indexed records on the site now total 4.65 billion. In 2019, the database received 169.5 million website visitors and now has 13.9 million registered users. The organisation also grew its network of local facilities around the world where genealogists can find assistance with their research.

For more details see the press release here.

FamilySearch has also released an overview of its plans for 2020. You can read them here.