Due to better technology and cheaper digital storeage space, genealogy search sites are putting more public records online than ever before.
From a recent article published on Naples News dot com —
Old family history records, from census information to draft cards, are now flooding the Internet thanks to new technology that makes it easier for companies to put fragile historical documents online.
Ancestry.com, a subscription service owned by MyFamily.com, has recently put a fully indexed version of the 1910 U.S. Census on the Web, culminating its six-year-long project of digitizing and indexing all publicly available U.S. Census records from 1790 to 1930.
This effort means users can now search all publicly available U.S. censuses for ancestors’ names, ages, birthplaces and places of residence. They can also discover other facts such as addresses, home values and occupations by viewing a digital image of the handwritten original document.
In recent months, FamilySearch.org, a free site sponsored by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has been expanding its collection of birth, marriage, death, census and other records. It has also begun a massive project to digitize billions of records previously available only on microfilm, particularly civil, church and local records. It plans to make those available online beginning early next year.
At the same time, a new genealogy search tool from MyHeritage, a free service based in Israel, is allowing consumers to simply search across hundreds of genealogy databases at once. These databases include everything from lists of passengers kept by ships transporting immigrants to war casualty records and photo archives.
While family-history aficionados have for years been able to hunt down batches of records (often with the help of subscription-only services available through libraries and schools), new services put such sources right at consumers’ fingertips and in one place. FamilySearch.org, a free site, says its recent efforts to digitize billions of reels of microfilm will allow consumers to access sources from their desk. Previously, the site could only tell users how to find the relevant microfilm.
You can read the entire article @ Genealogy Web sites expand research tools.