SR Visits

Family History Library of The Church of Jesus

Christ of Latter-day Saints
Greg Hatch, Contributor
Katy Ginanni, Column Editor

The Family History Library (FHL) of The Church Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
(LDS Church) is the world’s largest genealogical research institution. Located in Salt
Lake City, Utah, the library’s extensive collection features U.S. and international
historical society periodicals; family history monographs; and over 2.4 million rolls of
microfilm that contain municipal government, church, and business records dating
back to 1550. Through its family history centers and the FamilySearch.org Web site,
the library provides public access to the names and vital statistics of more than a
billion people. Serials Review learns about the library’s own history, cataloging
procedures, and digital projects. Serials Review 2006; 32:137–142.
D 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Figure 1. Vern Reed (seated left), serials team supervisor, uses a public computer at the Family History Library.

Hatch is Interim Head, Fine Arts/Instruction Librarian, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT 84112-
0860, USA; e-mail: greg.hatch@library.utah.edu.
Ginanni is Sales Manager, EBSCO Information Services, Johannesburg, South Africa; e-mail: kginanni@ebsco.com.
This article would not have been possible without the gracious cooperation of Vern Reed, who gave me a tour, sat for an in-depth
interview, and sent numerous e-mails to illuminate our conversations. Contributions and ideas from Tab Thompson were valuable
also.

0098-7913/$–see front matter D 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

doi:10.1016/j.serrev.2006.02.012

137
 Ginanni / Serials Review 32 (2006) 137–142
Introduction
Approach the Family History Library (FHL) in Decem-
ber and you will be captivated by the festive lights
adorning every tree, flowerbed, and wall in the ten-acre
Temple Square complex across the street, the physical
and spiritual home of The Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints (LDS Church). Music plays from
unseen speakers and crowds of sightseers from all walks
of life stroll past the Mormon Tabernacle—home to its
eponymous, world-famous choir—as they gaze at the
towering granite Temple, its six spires glowing against
the dark winter sky. Step inside the twenty-year-old
library building and you will quickly learn this is not just
your third-cousin-twice-removed local genealogical soci-
ety. One of the top ten tourist destinations in Utah, the
library is unexpectedly large—five floors covering
142,000 square feet.1 Greeters at the reception desk
hand out a brochure that proclaims it is the world’s
largest genealogical library, visited by more than 1,900
researchers and tourists each day. In the orientation
room, visitors watch a brief video on the library’s
history and services. The room is filled with family
photos and samples of vital records, passenger lists, and
church registries from around the globe. There is even a
comic book, Hunting for Your Heritage, for young
visitors to read. As patrons enter the main floor research
room and look over rows of computers and study tables,
they are greeted by a giant pedigree on the far wall. It
displays fourteen generations of colonist Anne Hutch-
inson’s descendants, who include president Erskine
Hamilton Childers of Ireland and U.S. presidents
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, George Bush, and George
W. Bush.
Facilities
The recently renovated, climate-controlled facility has a
reference desk, lockers for storage, and a copy center
with scanners on every floor, as well as four classrooms
and a computer lab. In addition, it has 570 microfilm
and microfiche readers, 202 individual computer sta-
tions, and even a videophone for deaf researchers to
contact one another. While the majority of the library is
open to the general public, Special Collections, which
contains records of sacred ordinances performed in the
LDS Church’s temples, is restricted to LDS Church
members in good standing.
Despite the physical size of the Family History Library’s
main building, its staff members work in four separate
locations. The collection development offices are one block
to the east, just across Temple Square, in the Joseph Smith
Memorial Building (formerly the Hotel Utah). It also houses
the FamilySearch Center, which has an additional one
hundred public computers. Due north, across a tree-lined
plaza with tranquil water features, is the twenty-eight story
Church Office Building, the headquarters of the LDS
Church and home to the serials, acquisitions, cataloging,
and technical systems departments.
In addition to these three facilities in the heart of
Salt Lake City, the library also operates the Granite
138
Mountain Records Vault, a film storage and process-
ing facility near the mouth of Little Cottonwood
Canyon in the Wasatch Mountains. The site is an old
stone quarry owned by the LDS Church, which
harvested two-ton blocks of granite to construct the
Salt Lake Temple twenty-five miles away. The vault—
which took six years and cost $2 million (that is $12
million when adjusted for inflation) to construct—
secures and preserves the master sets of microfiche
and microfilm in a network of tunnels and chambers
burrowed 700 feet into the mountainside, sealed
behind fourteen-ton Mosler doors.2
The Family History Library also has 4,000 branch
libraries, called family history centers, operated
throughout the United States and in eighty-eight coun-
tries.3 These worldwide satellites are primarily located in
LDS meetinghouses, but a few are located in public
libraries. And, like the main Family History Library, the
centers are free and open to the public.
History of the Organization
The Family History Library building is only twenty
years old, but the collection has been around since 1894
when the Genealogical Society of Utah (GSU) was
founded to assist members of the LDS Church in
gathering information about their family histories.
Genealogy plays a significant role in the church’s
religion.4 GSU acquired its first microfilm camera in
1938, embracing the technology as it first emerged.
When the society celebrated its fiftieth anniversary six
years later, 2,000 rolls of microfilm had already been
developed and the library collection had grown to
42,000 volumes, ranking it among the top five genea-
logical collections in the United States. An early adopter,
GSU purchased a computer in 1961 and hired a
computer expert to improve the society’s ability to
organize records and process information.
The first bWorld Conference on RecordsQ was held in Salt
Lake City in 1969, bringing world-renowned genealogical
experts together for the first time.5 In 1975, the LDS Church
founded its Genealogical Department (now the Family and
Church History Department), which took over library
operations. The Genealogical Society of Utah maintained
its focus on the cultivation and preservation of the
collection. Alex Haley spoke at the second bWorld Confer-
ence on RecordsQ in 1980 and acknowledged GSU for its
assistance on his book Roots. During this conference, the
LDS Church announced its plans to build a permanent
library facility, the Family History Library, so christened in
an effort to attract a broader audience of both professional
genealogists and hobbyists.
More recently, FHL and GSU partnered on some
tremendous projects. In 1990, they joined forces with the
Utah State Prison to embark on an eleven-year project to
index and automate the Freedman’s Bank records.6
During the post-Civil War era, Congress established the
bank so former slaves could safeguard their newly
acquired incomes. After nine years and $57 million in
deposits, the bank collapsed from mismanagement and
fraud. Left behind were the detailed records of the
 Ginanni / Serials Review 32 (2006) 137–142
African–American account holders. Approximately 550
Utah inmates volunteered to extract the vital statistics
and oral history transcriptions of more than 480,000
former slaves, compiling a database that links an
estimated ten million descendants today.
In 1993 the Family History Department enlisted
12,000 volunteers—in collaboration with the Statue of
Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation and the National Park
Service—and dedicated an estimated 5.6 million hours
over seven years to decipher and transcribe the data
from passenger arrival records for nearly twenty-two
million people who passed through Ellis Island in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.7 The Ellis
Island Genealogy Database is now freely available to
visitors of the Ellis Island Immigration Museum and its
Web site, which averaged an astonishing 27,000 hits per
second on its first day!
In 1999 the Family History Library launched its own
Web site (www.FamilySearch.org). An instant success,
the site has received more than fifteen billion hits,
averages over 50,000 visitors each day, and provides
access to six databases that contain the names of more
than one billion people from around the globe.8 Most
recently, the Family and Church History Department
announced plans for its newest facility, the Church
History Library, scheduled to open in 2007. The five-
story building will house an extensive collection of LDS
Church history documents, including 3.5 million manu-
scripts; 210,000 publications; 100,000 photographs; and
50,000 audiovisual materials.9
Scope of Collection
The Genealogical Society of Utah’s collection activities
focus on archiving records that document the major life
events—birth, death, marriage, immigration, etc.—of
people who lived before 1930, acquiring family histories,
and providing genealogists with materials that support
their research efforts. The Family History Library and the
family history centers do not provide resources for
locating or contacting people who are still alive. Micro-
film makes up the majority of the collection with about
2.4 million rolls of 35 mm and 16 mm film. Currently,
GSU has two hundred cameras in over forty-five
countries microfilming vital records from municipal
government, church, and business sources that date back
to 1550. They include bcensus returns; court, property,
and probate records; cemetery records; emigration and
immigration lists; printed genealogies; and family and
county histories.Q10 These records, obtained with full
cooperation from the authorities that have jurisdiction
over them, come from all over the globe and represent
more than 110 countries.
The collection also comprises 742,000 microfiches; 4,500
periodicals; 1,000 electronic resources; and more than
300,000 serials, CD-ROMs and monographs, including
family histories, bilingual dictionaries, dictionaries of
archaic terms, gazetteers, maps, and transcripts. The library
actively encourages genealogical societies and hobbyists to
donate unpublished family histories, organized collections,
and unique items that contain genealogical information. In
139
these cases, copyright owners are asked to sign a release
allowing the library to film the documents and lend copies to
family history centers. An average of 4,100 microfilm rolls,
700 books, and 16 electronic resources are added to the
collection each month.11
For nearly twenty years, the Family History Library
had a computerized catalog, built in-house, which had
bdumbQ input terminals with customized keyboards for
foreign characters. A full set of microfiche records was
printed annually. In 2000, the library switched to a
Windows-based, networked library management system
from Fretwell-Downing called OLIB. This product was
selected in part because it accommodates detailed notes
for family history and microfilm records, allows for real-
time authority control, and has the capacity for Cyrillic
and Asian characters. The company also customized the
product by creating a film number control file with
unlimited, repeatable notes; a hierarchical locality file;
and a permissions file that links titles with suppliers and
copyright holders with scanned contracts.
In addition to cultivating its collection, GSU
continually updates and upgrades its genealogy-related
electronic indexes. Amateur and professional genealo-
gists alike can access the following resources free-of-
charge from the FamilySearch Web site:12
! International Genealogical Index. An index of 600
million names of deceased individuals taken from
vital records from the early 1500s to 1885. Library
patrons have submitted an additional 125 million
names. Entry notes describe how the content was
obtained.
! Ancestral File. This database contains thirty-six
million names contributed by researchers from
around the world, organized into family groups and
pedigrees. For collaboration purposes, it also lists the
names and addresses of those who submitted content
to a file.
! Pedigree Resource File. An index with over eighty
million names along with birth, marriage, and death
information, organized into family trees. Each entry
includes submission notes and sources. Also available
on CD-ROM from which charts and reports can be
printed.
! U.S. Social Security Death Index. Lists the records of
deaths reported to the United States Social Security
Administration primarily from 1962 onward.
! Census. Contains the names and statistical data of
eighty-five million people collected in the 1880 United
States census, the 1881 British Isles census, and the
1881 Canadian census.
! Vital Records Index. Government and church records
available from Mexico, Denmark, Finland, Norway,
and Sweden.
A number of other electronic resources available on
CD-ROM and at the main library and family history
center facilities, but not yet online, include:
! U.S. Military Index. A list of United States military
personnel who died or were declared dead in Korea or
Vietnam from 1950 to 1975.
 Ginanni / Serials Review 32 (2006) 137–142
! Scottish Church Records. An index to pre-1855
parochial registers of the Church of Scotland as well
as some nonconformist records.
The Genealogical Society of Utah has also developed
genealogy-related software, which it distributes free-of-
charge from its Web site:
! Personal Ancestral File. Used to document, organize,
and share family history research data and pedigrees.
! TempleReady. Used by members of the LDS Church
to prepare the names of their ancestors for temple
ordinances.
Patrons who visit the library in person can use public
computers with access to free Web sites and subscription
databases. These include: PERSI via Ancestry.com, Soundex
Converter, Accessible Archives, One Great Family, Burke’s
Peerage & Gentry, New England Historic Genealogical
Society, the Oxford English Dictionary, a suite of Gale
biography databases, and hundreds of CD-ROMs with
digitized family history documents.
Public Services
The Family History Library and Genealogical Society of
Utah employ 125 full- and part-time professionals.
More than four hundred trained volunteers supplement
their ranks. Library staff answer reference questions and
train new researchers in the use of microfilm readers and
in-house databases. As a general policy, however, the
library does not offer professional genealogical research
services for hire. Instead, patrons are directed to the
International Commission for the Accreditation of
Professional Genealogists and the Board for Certifica-
tion of Genealogists for referrals. But there are excep-
tions. Library Public Affairs will occasionally assign its
staff to research and create family histories for high
profile individuals. Past examples include President Bill
Clinton, President Johannes Rau of Germany, and
Queen Sylvia of Sweden.13
All family history centers—staffed entirely by trained
volunteers—have interlibrary loan affiliation with the
main Family History Library. For a small postage and
handling fee, copies of FHL’s microfilm masters can be
sent to any center in the world for a thirty-day loan.
Microfiches can also be borrowed but, unlike micro-
films, they typically remain at the center for future
patrons’ use. About 1.2 million rolls of microfilm are
circulated to family history centers worldwide each
year.14
The library makes available an extraordinary variety
of free classes, guides, and research tools. Dozens of
genealogy classes are offered every month, ranging from
basic reference like bHow Do I Find My Family HistoryQ
to focused genealogy fare like bMigration Patterns East
of the Mississippi Prior to 1860Q and even weighty
topics like bThe Power of DNA: Discovering Lost and
Hidden Relationships.Q FamilySearch.org has a compre-
hensive tutorial that guides novice genealogists through
the questions they need to ask and suggests where they
will most likely find the answers. The Web site’s
140
educational materials also include a multitude of forms
for documenting research progress; timelines and histor-
ical highlights for national and international regions;
genealogy-related word and syntax lists for fifteen
European languages; and form letters for requesting
documents from non-English-speaking organizations.
Serials, Acquisitions, and Cataloging
According to Vern Reed, supervisor of the Family History
Library’s serials team, the organization had 4,340 active
subscriptions in 2005, primarily to publications by major
local genealogical and historical societies.15 Of those, 52
percent arrive quarterly, 20 percent annually, and 13
percent semi-annually. Approximately 85 percent of all
serials in the collection, including print and microfilm,
current and dead subscriptions, are in English, with
German, French, Norwegian, and Dutch rounding out
the top five languages. In 2005, acquisitions allocated 22
percent of its budget to serials. Mr. Reed was not able to
disclose actual serials budget numbers but indicated that
it was on the bhigh side of five figuresQ annually, which
puts the total annual acquisitions budget for the Family
History Library around $300,000. A third of the nearly
six hundred items the acquisitions department receives
each month are gifts.
After a new serial arrives and is processed at the
Church Office Building, it is couriered to the collection
development staff for review, and then to the main
library building. The turnaround is usually just a couple
of days. This quick processing time belies the challenge
presented by local historical society publications, how-
ever. During my interview with Mr. Reed, he related
several stories about irregularities in volume and issue
numbering due to naive, amateur editors and frequent
turnover of staff. For example, the historical society in a
predominantly Roman Catholic region does not use
seasons or the months of the Gregorian calendar to date
its publication; it uses the church’s ecclesiastical calen-
dar. Another society journal unintentionally repeated
the volume and issue numbers from one year to the next.
An inquiry revealed that the publisher now distinguishes
them by the cover image. The title of yet another
publication alternates biannually to reflect the migratory
habits of the featured clan. Mr. Reed reasons in such
egregious cases standard successive title entry practices
do not seem to benefit patrons. So, FHL catalogers
create a single record with the variant title tracings and
an explanatory note.16
The six serials team members recently split from
acquisitions and are now paired with cataloging, which
has twenty-six staff members. While around 80 percent of
new monographs can be copy cataloged, the large
number of catalogers is necessary to create original
records for microfilms. Family History Library catalog
records are created in the vernacular of the document but
they include an English summary note. Catalog records
are also unique in that they often provide a detailed
description of the item. For periodicals, individual works
are usually enumerated. Family histories frequently dis-
play dozens of surname tracings in the notes and subject
 Ginanni / Serials Review 32 (2006) 137–142
fields of a single item record and may even include a
summary of the pedigree. For most subject tracings, FHL
uses an indirect locality name with its own set of subject
subdivisions. For example, bHawaii, Maui, Kahului-
Buddhist recordsQ lists the state, county, then city
followed by a more exact subdivision than the Library
of Congress bChurch records and registersQ would allow.
Library of Congress headings are used, however, in the
instances of American Indian tribes, occupations, and for
works not bound by geographic location. With all of
these unique cataloging standards, it is not surprising that
the Family History Library is not a member of OCLC.
Due to the importance of the major collections’ inherently
geographic nature—microfilm records collected from old-
world and contemporary government agencies and
churches within distinct regions—the Family History
Library arranges its collection geographically, designating
its floors as United States and Canada, British Isles, and
International. (Extending this guiding principle further,
even the collection development staff is organized by
geographic region and language.) To support the geogra-
phy-centric approach and improve patron access, items are
cataloged with geographic headings reflecting their juris-
diction of origin with, then, a reference to the modern place
name. The library also uses its own modified version of
Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) to arrange its print
materials. It applies standard Dewey call numbers for the
ranges 000 through 920. But for the latter 900s (General
History), catalogers use b9Q as the root number and then
consult the Area Tables from the DDC to create a
geography-based classification. For example, the number
792 for Utah in Table 2 led to the call number 979.2 applied
to a book about the Utah State Archives, shelved in the US/
Canada book stacks on the third floor.
Family histories are assigned a Cutter number accord-
ing to the subject’s family name rather than the author’s
and are shelved alphabetically, quite suitable for brows-
ing genealogists. In contrast, microfilm is arranged by
accession number since film boxes in alphabetical or
classified order would have to be shifted frequently to
accomodate the large number added to the collection
each month.
Digitization
As so many library organizations do, the Family History
Library and Genealogical Society of Utah focus much of
their energy on digital enterprises. David E. Rencher,
director of Records and Information, detailed a number of
these projects in a presentation he gave at the b2005
Federation of Genealogical Societies ConferenceQ.17 GSU is
scanning around four hundred of the public-domain family
histories in the library’s collection each month, in an effort
to preserve the originals, as well as to improve patron access
since the print versions do not circulate. The resulting fully
searchable PDF documents become part of the Family
History Archive hosted by Brigham Young University’s
Harold B. Lee Library and then are linked to their reciprocal
Family History Library catalog records.
Along with digitization come new challenges, however.
The Genealogical Society of Utah has created a new
141
software and hardware system called Scanstone, which is
being used to digitize the 2.4 million rolls of microfilm in
the Granite Mountain Records Vault over the next six
years. That is nearly two billion individual images with
data that need to be indexed to improve access for
genealogists. As with other Family History Library
projects, amateur genealogists and LDS Church members
around the world are stepping up to assist with a
corollary new venture, FamilySearch Indexing. Volun-
teers view individual record images and transcribe each
form’s information using a software program down-
loaded from the FamilySearch Web site. A field in the
form image is highlighted in blue to correspond with the
index field being filled by the volunteer. Two individuals,
whose entries are compared for discrepancies to ensure
accuracy, transcribe each record; a third transcript is
created when necessary.
Conclusion
During a time when governments of the world are
frequently at war with one another and xenophobia
pervades our culture, the Family History Library is
doing its part to remind us of our common humanity.
This sentiment is nicely summed up in a quote found
under a portrait of Senator Orrin Hatch near the
entrance to the library: bEssentially, we are all immi-
grants to this country. Our ancestors come from differ-
ent parts of the globe. By searching for our roots, we
come closer together as a human family.Q
Notes
1. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, bAbout the Family
History Library,Q FamilySearch, http://www.familysearch.org/
ENG/library/fhl/library_main.asp (accessed January 22, 2006).
2. Encyclopedia of Mormonism: The History, Scripture, Doctrine,
and Procedure of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,
s.v. bGranite Mountain Record Vault.Q
3. The family history center nearest you can be found by going to
http://www.familysearch.org or by calling 1-800-346-6044 in the
United States or Canada.
4. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, bHistory of the
Family History Library,Q FamilySearch, http://www.familysearch.
org/Eng/Library/FHL/frameset_library.asp?PAGE=library_history.
asp (accessed January 22, 2006).
5. James B. Allen, Jessie L. Embry, and Kahlile B. Mehr, Hearts
Turned to the Fathers: A History of the Genealogical Society of
Utah, 1894–1994, BYU Studies (Provo, UT: Brigham Young
University, 1995).
6. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,
bBreakthrough in Black Family History Research,Q http://
www.lds.org/newsroom/showrelease/0,15503,4044-1-4437,00.
html (accessed January 22, 2006).
7. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, bEllis Island
Immigrant Database: Latter-day Saints Play Key Role,Q http://
www.lds.org/newsroom/showpackage/0,15367,3881-1-4-167,00.
html (accessed January 22, 2006).
8. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, bFacts and
Statistics,Q FamilySearch, http://www.familysearch.org/Eng/
 Ginanni / Serials Review 32 (2006) 137–142
Home/News/frameset_news.asp?PAGE=home_facts.asp (acces-
sed January 22, 2006).
9. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, bNew
Church History Library to Be Constructed,Q http://
www.lds.org/newsroom/showrelease/0,15503,4044-1-21378,00.
html (accessed January 22, 2006).
10. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, bFamilySearch
Questions,Q FamilySearch, http://www.familysearch.org/ENG/
Home/FAQ/frameset_faq.asp?FAQ=faq_library.asp (accessed
January 22, 2006).
11. See note 1.
12. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, bKey Library
Resources,Q FamilySearch, http://www.familysearch.org/Eng/
Library/FHL/library_resources.asp (accessed January 22, 2006);
also see note 1.
142
13. Tab Thompson (Family History Library Public Affairs), e-mail
message to Greg Hatch, January 12, 2006.
14. See notes 1 and 10.
15. Vernon Reed (supervisor, Serials Team, Genealogical Society of
Utah, Salt Lake City), interview with Greg Hatch, December 12,
2005. Mr. Reed also provided the author with acquisition budget
figures and serials holdings data.
16. Vernon Reed, e-mail message to Greg Hatch, December 15,
2006.
17. David E. Rencher, bA Sneak Peak [sic] at the Near FutureQ
(presentation, Federation of Genealogical Societies Confer-
ence, Salt Lake City, UT, September 9, 2005), Family-
Search, http://www.familysearch.org/Eng/Library/Education/
sneak_peak_David_E_Rencher.pdf (accessed January 22,
2006).