45 Million Plus Obituaries Now on FamilySearch.org

For the last few years, FamilySearch.org has been working with GenealogyBank.com in adding millions of newspaper obituaties to the FamilySearch Historical Record Collections. Presently, there are 45,512,634 obituaries in the Collections. Over 34 million of these records have been indexed by an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) program. Because of this new-to-FamilySearch OCR option, the following instructions have been given:

Over 23 million records in this collection were transcribed by computer. There may be errors with names or relationships. Once you select a person a message appears at the top of the details page that begins with "This record was indexed by a computer; there may be errors". The link reading "the form on this page" opens the "Errors?" link at the lower left corner of the page. Please help us fix these records by reporting errors using the form that appears in the "Errors?" link. Options will appear allowing for the description of the problem. Reported errors will be reviewed and revised as necessary.

As of the date of this post, 34,168,513 of the images had been read by OCR and an index created for searching this vast database.

The OCR process coupled with user corrections will prove to be highly effective in adding indexed records to the FamilySearch.org collection effort to index all of the records. We also look forward to FamilySearch adopting some of the new handwriting OCR programs to add these records to the Historical Record Collections.