There are millions of them.

They’re being photographed at record speed.

They’re all over the place and amazingly enough Google doesn’t have anything to do with it.

So, what hasn’t seen the light of day?  Historic records.

It took over 80 years to make a billion records readily searchable but volunteers made another billion available in the last 7 years. 400 million images a year are collected.  230 camera teams in 45 countries are now photographing historic records some of which have never seen the light of day according to Paul Nauta with FamilySearch.

The online website ‘Genealogy in Time‘ keeps a running list of what new historic records are on the internet, how many of what kind and if the service is free or fee based.  Some of their information states:

• FamilySearch.org has added 2 million WWI draft registration cards from 1917-1918 which is 86% of the entire lot. Almost all men age 40 and under in the U.S. filled out one of these even if they didn’t serve in the war.
• Archives.com has 3 million birth, marriage and death records of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the U.S. from 1800-1940
• Genealogy Trails has completed the U.S. Civil War Union Soldier Headstone Project with free access.
• 4.1 million records of Germans who migrated to America between 1850 – 1897 can be found on FamilySearch.org.
• Newspaper Archive has over 5000 papers and 120 million pages of historic information.
• The Lost Souls Genealogy Project added 100,000 records of mostly biographies submitted by users.  Free.

ETC. etc. more, so on and so forth, the list goes on . . . . . . . . . . . .

These are incredible times in many ways.  The access to information of this type has never before been so available.  Even if you’re not searching for anyone or anything in particular, you might enjoy a step back in time when perusing these different sites and records.