Highlights from 2017 from FamilySearch

FamilySearch published a series of five infographics detailing statistics for the year 2017. Each of these infographics addresses a different aspect of FamilySearch activity during the year. Here are the details for the image above about the FamilySearch.org Family Tree.

FamilySearch’s Family Tree encourages family collaboration. In 2017, more than 27 million new ancestors were added, 3.7 million through mobile devices. Over 1.2 billion people are now in the FamilySearch Family Tree. An updated user-to-user messaging feature simplifies collaboration with others doing research on common ancestors. System upgrades now enable users to merge duplicate records of large or highly common family lines.

Here are the rest of the infographics with their individual explanations.

FamilySearch support volunteers donated 3.4 million hours of service in 2017, resolving over 1 million patron inquiries. More than 320,000 online volunteer indexers contributed another staggering 8.3 million hours to make 283 million new historical records freely accessible. 

Dozens of free video courses were added to the FamilySearch Learning Center. Almost 100,000 helpful how-to articles are also now available through the FamilySearch Wiki.

I was privileged to contribute a few hours as a volunteer this past year. This year, both my wife and I are working full-time as missionaries digitizing records at the Maryland State Archives.

Sometimes these numbers are so large as to be almost meaningless. The real meaning comes when you use the website to find one of your ancestors.

The annual # RootsTech 2018 conference will be held from February 28 to March 3, 2018. Registration is still open.

 During the year 2018, my wife and I will be serving as full-time FamilySearch missionaries digitizing records at the Maryland State Archives in Annapolis, Maryland. We are proud to be part of the FamilySearch effort to preserve our family heritage.