Overview: Historical Collections for U.S. Research

The LDS Family History Library (FHL) in Salt Lake City has collected over 700,000 microfilm rolls for family and local history research in the United States. The microfilms are copies of original documents found in federal, state, and county archives and courthouses, as well as private repositories such as churches. Most of the microfilmed records may be loaned to any of the 4,500 local LDS Family History Centers. The FHL itself, and its nearby FamilySearch Center, welcome hundreds of thousands of visitors and researchers each year. The facilities are free.

The collections are supplemented by at least 100,000 published genealogies and many thousands of local histories and printed transcripts of records. About half of these books can be loaned to family history centers on microfilm or microfiche.

In addition, at the free www.familysearch.org are the online indexes such as:
names of over 75 million individuals who were born or married in the U.S. before 1895, in the online International Genealogical Index; the 50 million names of the U.S. 1880 federal census, in complete households, are also online there, as well as new indexes and links for other major census schedules.

The LDS Church also donated 24 million names from immigration manifests (1892-1924 for the port of New York) for the database at www.ellisisland.org . Tens of millions of civil death records in the U.S. are currently being digitized and indexed by volunteers doing FamilySearch Indexing; results are being posted on a free Pilot site [see the Forum for that].

The key to the FHL is the Family History Library Catalog (FHLC), for which there is a Group on GenealogyWise. The FHLC is the world’s largest index of genealogy indexes, original records, and compiled sources.