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SALT LAKE CITY -- Hundreds of people from around the world are in Salt Lake for the National Genealogical Society Family History Conference.
Granite Mountain stores 35 billion images of genealogical information on 2.4 million rolls of microfilm. -LDS Church
Attendees got quite a treat at the opening seminar on Wednesday. They had the chance to see inside the place where 35 billion images of genealogical information are stored.
Jay Verkler, President and CEO of the LDS Church's Familysearch.org, gave convention-goers a "virtual video tour" of the granite vaults in Little Cottonwood Canyon.
Eight decades of historical documents of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and the largest genealogical collection, are preserved in the vaults on microfilm. Those 2.4 million images are now being converted to digital files.
Tracing your family roots back as far as possible has gotten a lot easier in recent years. A couple of mouse clicks on a website can take you back generations in a matter of minutes.
Deseret News:
Granite Mountain vault opened for virtual tour
Kicking off the national Family History Conference at the Salt Palace Convention Center was Wednesday morning's virtual video tour of the seldom-seen Granite Mountain Records Vault."There were a lot of people who said, ‘Wow, it's just so neat to see what you do' and ‘We had no idea that there was so much technology involved in converting and preserving the digital data,'" Verkler said.
The vaults were carved into the granite mountainside in the early 1960s and were fully operational in 1965.
Verkler, who heads the LDS Church's family history division, told convention-goers that genealogy research is coming of age. Staffers are working full time, taking every image on the old microfilms and converting them.
"The key to digital is how easy it is to use," Verkler said. "Think about having to rent a microfilm and wait for that microfilm to come, instead of going online and asking a question, and in one second that image is there. Then you can ask the next question. So, that's the real value with digital. A lot of people don't have the patience to wait for weeks for that next piece of information, so it makes it much more accessible."
The digital conversion of the old records will take years to complete, but Verkler says what's been done already has fueled tremendous growth in family research.
"There's unquestionably more of a groundswell of interest," he said. "And as these records become available, they're so much easier to use, then more and more people can use them."
The National Genealogical Society's family history convention runs through Saturday at the Salt Palace.
E-mail: kmccord@ksl.com
