Amateur and professional genealogists, regardless of faith, are free to burrow into the church's materials, including the Ancestral File, a computerized database that compiles and cross-references family trees submitted by hundreds of thousands of people, and the International Genealogical Index (IGI), which includes a whopping 300 million names. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has also seeded the planet with more than 3,000 Family History centers, mini-archives that stretch from Utah to Europe to Tonga - franchises of the dead. The vault is off limits to everyone but church employees and techies, but copies of its holdings are available to all comers, no charge, at Salt Lake City's Family History Library, a massive repository that sits opposite the manicured lawns and ethereal spires of Temple Square. The Granite Mountain Record Vault holds around 2 billion names, a sizable portion of the total number of people who have ambled through recorded history. ![]() Behind 700 feet of granite and six monstrous Mosler doors, the Mormon Church has squirreled away the world's largest collection of genealogical material: more than 2 million microfilm reels of parish records, marriage indexes, necrologies, census reports, pilgrim registers, and piles of other documents - some dating back to the Middle Ages. Twenty-two miles southeast of Salt Lake City, buried deep in the ragged rock of Utah's Wasatch Range, lies a catacomb of names. The Mormon Church, famous for a fixation on departed souls, is dumping a mountain of free data into the red-hot world of Web genealogy. ![]() ![]() It's open-source time in the great beyond.
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