FindMyPast has a huge booth here at RootsTech 2016. Their big announcement was made this morning, stating that they will release millions of marriage records every quarter and aims to complete the entire digitization project by the end of 2017. Thirty-three million records have been launched and are available for free access through the 15th of the month. The following announcement was made by FindMyPast.
FINDMYPAST ANNOUNCES LARGEST ONLINE COLLECTION OF U.S. MARRIAGES FROM 1650-2010 100 MILLION RECORDS, 450 MILLION+ NAMES
Salt Lake City: 4 February 2016 – Time: 7am MT, 9am EST, 2pm GMT: Leading family history company, Findmypast , announced today at RootsTech that, in partnership with FamilySearch International, it will launch the single largest online collection of U.S. marriages in history.Covering 360 years of marriages from 1650-2010, when complete this landmark collection will contain at least 100 million records and more than 450 million names from 2,800 counties across America. More than 60 per cent of these marriage records have never before been published online. When complete, this collection will only be found in its entirety exclusively on Findmypast.
To kick start the collection, Findmypast has launched the first 33 million records of this ambitious project today and is offering them to the public for free from now until 15 February. The records include marriage date, bride and groom names, birthplace, birth date, age, residence as well as fathers’ and mothers’ names. Customers with family trees on Findmypast will benefit from leads connecting relatives on their trees with the marriage records, thus generating a whole new source of research.
Those seeking a bit of star dust will find the marriage records for actors from Bette Davis to Jimmy Stewart, actor turned President, Ronald Reagan, founding father Samuel Adams, writers including F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Steinbeck, jazz great Duke Ellington and baseball legend Babe Ruth to name but a few among the hundreds of millions of names.
Commenting, Annelies van den Belt, CEO, Findmypast said:
“We are delighted to be working with FamilySearch to bring this hugely important collection online. The launch of the U.S. marriages project is central to our growth strategy in the U.S. The millions of new U.S. records will complement Findmypast’s massive collection of British and Irish data allowing us to provide many more connections and a more comprehensive experience to family historians in the US and all over the world.Steve Rockwood, CEO of FamilySearch said:
“We greatly value our close working relationships with our partners and record archives. They enable us as a community to get important records available to family history researchers online much, much faster. The US marriage records agreement with Findmypast is an excellent example. We are delighted to assist making these records available.”
