FamilySearch Posted Year in Review Highlights



FamilySearch International is the largest genealogy organization in the world. FamilySearch is a nonprofit, volunteer-driven organization sponsored by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. FamilySearch posted a year in review that highlights of their work in 2017.

Here are some facts from the highlights:

There are 1.2 billion people who use FamilySearch. In 2017, more than 27 million new ancestors were added, 3.7 million through mobile devices.

FamilySearch has 4.42 million total contributors. There were 1.8 million new contributors to FamilySearch in 2017.

FamilySearch has 844 million total sources. 149 of those sources were newly added in 2017. It also has a total of 2.5 billion hints (which help FamilySearch users to discover records that might connect to one of their relatives or ancestors). 450 million new hints were added in 2017.

FamilySearch has a total of 5.9 billion searchable records online. A total of 283 million of those searchable records were names that FamilySearch added in 2017. FamilySearch added a total of 33 million new historical record collections images, 14.7 million new book scanning images, and 265 million new images published in the Family Search Catalog Viewer in 2017.

As you may know, indexing at FamilySearch is done by volunteers. Those volunteers have now donated a total of 3.4 million hours of service, resolving over 1 million patron inquiries. In 2017, there were a total of 320,807 total online indexing volunteers. Together, they donated a total of 8,286,403 indexing hours, and made 283 million new historical records freely available.

In 2017, FamilySearch opened a new discovery center in St. George, Utah. They also opened the Discover Experiences at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah. Over 5.6 million people visited these two new facilities (and the 5,058 FamilySearch family history centers that are located worldwide). 98 new FamilySearch centers were opened in 2017.

There were a total of 134 million FamilySearch.org visits in 2017. Out of that number, a total of 8.9 were registered users of FamilySearch. The top countries for new FamilySearch patrons were: United States, Brazil, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Mexico, Argentina, Germany, the Philippines, and Italy.

In 2017, dozens of free video courses were added to the online FamilySearch Learning Center. The FamilySearch Wiki had almost 100,000 how-to articles added to it in 2017.

FamilySearch hosted RootsTech 2017, the largest world-wide family history technology conference. RootsTech 2017 had a total of 26,000 attendees. RootsTech 2017 had 100,000 online views and 23,000 Family Discovery Day attendees.

Related Articles at FamilyTree.com:

* FamilySearch Recommends You Sign-In

* How to Start Indexing Online for FamilySearch

* How to Prepare for RootsTech

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