A Family History Mission: Where do all the online records come from?

As my wife and I prepare to serve a full-time mission in the Washington, D.C. North Mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as Record Preservation Missionaries, my thoughts turn to the vast work of preserving the world's records. We have been told that we will be serving in the Maryland State Archives in Annapolis, Maryland. To document and share our mission experience, I will be posting updates about our mission on this blog for all to read. I have just decided to use the general title of "A Family History Mission" as the tagline for this series that will hopefully be written during our service in Maryland.

It is obvious that some cultures and countries place little or no emphasis or interest on preserving valuable family history records. Even where efforts are made to preserve important records, the ravages of time often destroy records despite those efforts. This tragic loss of records around the world is the concern of those who are interested, for a variety of reasons, in the preservation of all of the genealogically valuable records of the world.

Since the 1800s the Church has been involved in record preservation. This effort took a giant leap forward in 1938 with the advent of using microfilm to preserve images of the existing records. This extensive microfilming work produced approximately 2.4 million rolls of microfilm. To preserve this accumulated collection of microfilm and other records, the Church built a huge storage tunnel in the side of a mountain located near Salt Lake City, Utah known as the Granite Vault. More recently, with the technological change from microfilm to digital images, this collection of microfilmed records is still in the process of being digitized. In addition, the preservation efforts continue as missionary-volunteers are sent around the world to digitize millions more genealogically valuable records.

As much as is possible, these accumulated digitized records are being made available online, for free, on the FamilySearch.org website. Our interest in preserving additional records is the primary motivation for going on a year-long mission. Through our efforts, additional records will become available online to assist individuals and families to find their ancestral heritage. In addition, many more people will have the privilege of taking their deceased ancestors' names to the temples to provide those ancestors with the opportunity to accept sacred ordinances.

Since my wife and I will be serving in the Maryland State Archives, here is an example of the type of previously digitized records from Maryland on the FamilySearch.org website that we may be helping to digitize:

"Maryland Probate Estate and Guardianship Files, 1796-1940," database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:S3HT-DYZS-VZ?cc=1542664&wc=342Q-1XL%3A83640401%2C97817501%2C107197501 : 20 May 2014), Cecil > J > Johnson, Robert P (1885-32) > image 1 of 4; county courts, Maryland.

The Catalog on FamilySearch.org has listings for all of the currently digitized records. As new records are added, they will be listed in the Catalog.

The process of providing digitized genealogically valuable records online in fairly complex. It begins with identifying and evaluating collections of records around the world that may be available. Representatives of FamilySearch negotiate contracts with the record repositories to provide both the equipment and the labor to digitize the records for free. Rights to publish the records online on the FamilySearch.org website are also negotiated where possible. In some cases, the repositories place some restrictions on the dissemination of the records such as requiring the records be viewed only in Family History Centers or at the main Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah. But millions upon millions of records are made available.

Arrangements are made to have a missionary couple or missionary couples with the FamilySearch cameras and software available to do the work of taking digital photos of the paper records. The digital images are then sent to FamilySearch for further processing and uploading to FamilySearch.org. This is a rather simplified version of a much more complex process, but escentually, the records are made available for free on the website.

This is an important work and will continue for the forseable future. We are glad to play a very small part in this great work.