On May 24, 1999, the genealogy world welcomed the launch of a website called FamilySearch.org, a new and different way of researching ancestors with free images and indexed records.

In the ensuing 20 years, we genealogists have come to rely on FamilySearch.org as one of the top online sites for our research. We find an ever-growing repository of digitized images, we can expand out knowledge and skills through the Wiki and Learning Center, and it’s still all free.

Doing genealogy without FamilySearch.org is unthinkable today. According to Dick Eastman’s recent post, FamilySearch.org now boasts over 7 billion searchable names and over 3 billion searchable images of historical records. And it adds more than 300 million new historical records and images yearly from archives worldwide.

Twenty years of FamilySearch.org is indeed something to celebrate. Why not log on and find another ancestor today?