Today’s press release from FamilySearch relates that “FamilySearch added 31 million new, free records online this past week for Argentina, Canada, Colombia, Czech Republic, Dominican Republic, Hungary, Italy, Micronesia, New Zealand, Peru, Philippines, Portugal, Russia, and the U.S. What a bonus for those with California roots—over 24 million California birth records were added from 1905 to 1995. Search these and 2.5 billion other records now for free at FamilySearch.org.”
When you arrive at the main page, scroll down to “Browse by Location” and click on a country name. That opens up a long list of digitized records and many indexes that are free for anyone to use. You may need to sign in to view some. It doesn’t cost anything to become a registered user. While there you might consider signing up to help index some of the records that are images only!
I keep wondering about statistics of the FamilySearch website and I found what I needed on the bottom of this page: https://www.familysearch.org/news. It doesn’t say when the statistics were last updated, but they are still fascinating. The date the FamilySearch website made its debut was 24 May 1999. I remember that well.
Number of names in searchable databases: Over 1 billion
Number of hits since launch: Over 15 billion
Number of visitors since launch: Over 150 million
Number of pages viewed since launch: Over 5 billion
Number of hits per day: Over 10 million
Number of visitors per day: Over 50,000
Number of pages viewed per day: Over 1 million
Number of registered users: Over 1 million
© 2012 – 2014, Paula Stuart-Warren. All rights reserved.
