Five billion searchable names — that’s billion, as in “gabillion” — are now online, thanks to Salt Lake City’s Ancestry.com. For three days, you can search the whole magilla without paying a cent. After that, it’s $155 a year.
It’s a huge opportunity, especially since Ancestry just finished adding complete census records from 1790 to 1930, and it’s the only place you can search those records in detail online. Mercy! Think of it — from 1790. That’s just after the Revolutionary War.
Ancestry says it took workers a combined 6.6 million hours of labor to pull off this staggering feat. They had to scan images of census documents, figure out the handwriting, then catalog each record — by hand. On a keyboard. 540 million names. Oy.
Read more at New West Network.
Or check it out at Ancestry.com.