Watching the Avalance

I have been fascinated with avalanches since I was carried down a mountainside in an avalanche in the Wasatch Mountains a few years ago. You can get a brief idea of my perspective on avalanches from the short video above as I rode the avalanche about 1000 vertical feet down the side of the mountain.

Sometimes, I get a similar feeling (although minus the death issues) from watching the huge numbers of records being added almost daily to the FamilySearch.org Historical Record Collections. A screenshot of the most recent additions shows millions of new records being added or updated.

You can see the list sorted by the most recently added or updated records by clicking on the colomn title "*Last Undated." If I click on the the name of one of the collections added, such as the Vermont, Town Clerk, Vital and Town Records, 1732 - 2005, I would see the following:

If you look closely, you will see that there are 1,386,297 images in this one collection. If I look at one of the images, I would see something like the following:

In other words, there are a number of entries on every page so the total number of individuals in the collections is much higher than the number of images.

One thing you can see from the partial list above is the need for Indexing. All of the collections labeled "Browse Images" are waiting to be indexed. In addition, many of the collections that show numbers of records are far from being completely digitized. For example, the United States, Freedmen's Bureau Hospital and Medical Records, 1865-1872 show 4,641 records. By clicking on the name, you can see that there are many more images, 44,734 to be exact. Here is the screenshot showing the number of images:

FamilySearch.org is not unique among the large online, genealogy database programs in adding millions of records. Any researcher should be aware that the number of records in these programs increases almost daily.