It's hard to envision big numbers. We can grasp figures such as 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 957 million names in the databases of Family-Search <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 (LDS) 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 10 billion hits and is visited more than 130,000 times daily.

FamilySearch is your online gateway to the world's largest genealogy resource: the Family History Library (FHL) in Salt Lake City. Some searchers strike potential gold on their first visit, downloading generation after generation of pedigree charts. Others surf off disappointed, typically because they don't utilize the site's amazing capabilities. Once you learn your way around FamilySearch, you can use it to ferret out elusive ancestors, collateral lines and even those difficult-to-locate female relatives. With 957 million names, after all, some of your relatives are bound to be in there — you just have to know how to look.