My friends - Today I want to mention to our subscribers about the fantastic project which the LDS Church has undertaken recently to place 20 *billion* names online within the next several decades, which will come from the 2.3 million rolls of microfilm which are stored in their vaults under Granite Mountain in Utah. Involved with this will be some 200,000 family histories which the Church has in its holdings. There was a modest announcement of this project several months ago, but the Church is not overly publicizing it as yet, because it will ultimately involve many thousands of volunteers(just like us)all over the country, who will have access to special software supplied by the Church for the use by the volunteers who will do various tasks(indexing, arranging data, and many others)with the images which are supplied, via the software, to the volunteers. You can imagine what a time sensitive project this will be - for example, it took nearly 30,000 volunteers 12 years to get the 1880 census ready for online use. Technology has improved significantly since then, of course, but this is still a staggering amount of work. The Church is beginning the project slowly, as they work with the new software and eliminate bugs, try different approaches to speed up the process without loss of accuracy, etc., and, in some cases, issues of permissions must be addressed. Once all of that is worked out, the Church will begin to publicize the effort more openly and begin asking for volunteers. We can be sure that they will undoubtedly get them. At this early point, they did not want an onslaught of volunteers coming forward when they are not yet ready to proceed "full bore" on the project. Stay tuned on this one - I will keep you posted. BTW, there are about 4200 family histories which are already one line through the BYU site at www.familyhistoryarchive.byu.edu - if you've not visited there, I recommend it, even if nothing is found on your family - yet. -B ====================================================================