The Roots PC: Mormons ready new download
The Mormon Church is making computerized genealogical research easier than ever before.
As of Monday, June 28, the Church is offering free downloads of Personal Ancestral File 4.0, a new Windows-based version of its genealogical management program. The new software program is available at www.familysearch.org.
The program does not provide genealogical data. Instead, it helps users organize their family history records, then obviates the need for illegible trees hand-written in ancient, spidery script. The program also creates charts and logs to help users in their search for missing ancestors.
The Mormon Church, which has been gathering genealogical records across the world for more than a century, houses a mother lode of information. It operates more than 3,400 Family History Centers and houses a huge collection of records at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, which boasts records of more than 2 billion names.
Match made in heaven
The Internet and the Mormons are seemingly a match made in heaven. Family history research ranks among the most popular Net-based activities around. Coincidentally, family history research is considered a religious obligation among the Mormons.
The Mormon Church, officially the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which has 10.4 million members worldwide, has spent three-plus decades computerizing ancestral records. FamilySearch.org, a Web site subsidized by the Mormons, last month unveiled database of 400 million publicly searchable names, and plans to publish a total of 600 million names by year-end.
According to the Church, ancestors can be redeemed after death if a relative learns their name and approaches the church to be "baptized by proxy. "The idea that you can affect the life of an ancestor in the spiritual world is the philosophical drive behind the Church's name gathering," said Dan Rascon, a Church spokesman.
That philosophy also explains the Church rationale for electronically releasing its PAF software. "We've always made our facilities public because we think it's a good thing for people to be involved in their genealogies," says Rascon. "It made sense to make the information as widely available as possible."
Rascon estimated that 40 million people a day visited the names database afterits May 24 launch. Visits have since leveled off at about 15 million. "We're bracing for a heavy day Monday," he said.