Some people eat, sleep and chew gum, I do genealogy and write...

Friday, May 13, 2022

When will the FamilySearch Family Tree be finished?


The simple answer to the question of when the FamilySearch.org Family Tree will be "finished" is never as long as technology continues to advance, and people continue to be born. A more realistic question involves setting some arbitrary goal for the Family Tree and then declaring that it is finished. I also guess that yet another question could revolve around the proposition that the current Family Tree will be replaced by some other program just as happened with new.FamilySearch.org. In that case, the present form of the Family Tree could be considered to be finished because it would disappear. 

Presently, the FamilySearch.org Family Tree contains entries for about 1.4 billion people (not taking allowance for duplicates). It is estimated that 117 billion people have lived on the earth. See "How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth?" Obviously, a very high percentage of those people died without any record of their lives. However, the current population of the earth is about 7.7 billion people so we can see that the number of people in the Family Tree, that is mainly dead people, is far from complete. 

What do we mean by finished? Will the Family Tree program itself ever be finished? As I have already mentioned, technology continues to change and as technology changes so will computer programs and websites such as FamilySearch.org

My conclusion is that you should not hold your breath waiting for the Family Tree to be complete. But this is a very good reason for getting involved and doing family history research. 

 

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