It's hard to envision big numbers. We can grasp figures like 60,000 only because we know that's about how many fans it takes to fill a football stadium. Without such a familiar point of reference, though, we're lost. That's why the total of more than 894 million names in the databases of FamilySearch <www.familysearch.org> is almost incomprehensible. That's more than three times the current US population.

Figures on the site's popularity are even more staggering. Back on May 24, 1999, when the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints unveiled the free FamilySearch site, it was the biggest thing ever to happen to online genealogy. Users instantly overwhelmed the site, creating one of the Web's biggest traffic jams. Since then, FamilySearch has collected more than 6 billion hits and gets visited by more than 145,000 people daily.