Happy New Year
I hope you all had a wonderful holiday season and are off and running into the New Year. Before we jump into all the exciting things we have planned for 2011, I’d like to take a few minutes and look back at some highlights from 2010. It really was an inspiring year!
For those of you who just joined us this year, you may not know that the Ancestry World Archives Project started in beta in mid-2008 and wasn’t formally launched until Fall of that year. For a community that is really only a couple of years old, you all are doing amazing things.
Fun Stats
- There were 31,761 new contributors who joined us in 2010 bringing our grand total to 64,861.
- Our community keyed and arbitrated 28,226,544 records in 2010 which resulted in 14,912,333 records indexed and ready for searching.
- We have now released a grand total of 49 completed projects. There are an additional 33 that our community has finished keying and are now in final processing before going live.
- We are currently working on 36 active projects.
World Record Challenge: Holiday 2010 Edition
We just finished a two month holiday challenge in which $5000 was up for grabs. The top five contributors will select a genealogical or historical organization of their choice. Ancestry.com will donate money to that organization in their name. We hope those organizations will then use those funds to continue the great work of record preservation and access that we are all so passionate about. The winners are:
- 127,813 – Anne from Derbyshire
- 104,860 – Karen from Nottinghamshire
- 101,771 – Jeanette from Michigan
- 63,930 – Ann from Texas
- 62,583 – Elisabeth from Yorkshire
Yep – 2010 was a great year. Thanks to each of you and your generous contribution of time and skill there are now over 20 million records live on Ancestry.com that can be searched for free by anyone. One keystroke at a time we are saving the records of the world.
Here’s to an even better 2011. Happy New Year to you all.
Until Next Time – Happy Keying!
Thank you, Ancestry, for bringing so many genealogists and family historians together as a ‘community’ to work on preserving and indexing records many of us never knew existed! Happy New Year!