I acknowledge the frustration our Mac users in our community experiences when Ancestry produces products that are not Macintosh compatible.  While we do not have anything new to announce for our Mac community at this time I did want to say that your message is being heard and is a point of discussion in our product roadmap planning meetings as we explore our options for converting the keying tool so it will support multiple operating systems.

At best I can say, don’t loose your passion for this cause!

We began the beta portion of the project in June of 2008, since then we have had a wonderful response from many of you including a number of partnerships with genealogical societies.  Your passion for this work is evident through the phenomenal activity we see daily, you’re an amazing group and on behalf of me and the entire World Archives Project staff we want to thank you!

 I also want to take a moment to thank our staff who shares a love and enthusiasm for this project providing many hours of “behind the scenes” work.

 Just as the thrill of watching a baby take its first steps or say their first words this project has been filled with many firsts, all of which have been fun to anticipate and participate in.  I’m excited to see what can be accomplished in our next year!

 Key Data and Milestones

• Developed an industry leading desktop transcription tool.
• Public launch March 2009 with over 12,000 contributors participating in the beta
• Over 19,000 contributors YTD, located in 70 countries & territories.
• Over 28.7 Million records keyed and arbitrated (will result in more than 13 million free record indexes that will be published to the Ancestry sites.
• More than 367 thousand hours logged.
• Three collections, over 438k free records published to the site
• Partnerships with 19 Genealogical Societies

If you would like to participate in the project go to www.ancestry.com/worldarchivesproject