September first of this year - just a couple weeks away - you will no longer be able to order microfilm from Salt Lake City's Family History Library/Archives to be sent to your nearest temple library. I have to tell you that I've talked to people at Genealogy Societies and at my public library and generally, people are panicked.
I guess my commentary that I would never be able to duplicate my research without these films to this day has not been heard.
What's up with LDS? Is it that not enough films are rented, making it financially impossible? They say that microfilm is dead, sort of like microfiche has been. Digitalized Computer Images are better. Well, digitalized images are computer dependent. And that forces you to own a computer or go to a public use computer. Believe me my cell phone and FamilySearch are compatible, but the screen is way too small to deal with all those digital images.
Read the fine print and you'll see that individual libraries are going to make decisions about what they keep when it comes to microfilm. Usually a fee is charged for the rental and then you can renew the film as you use it. What I see ahead shortly is some fast ordering by researches and a pile of last minute money to be made by LDS but also a gradual phasing out of the microfilms.
Latter Day Saints/Family Search says that by 2020, just a few years, everything they have to offer will be on their web site, Family Search. It's those few years that worry us completely. That seems almost impossible to me, considering that one category of film I use a lot has apparently been considered done by revealing baptismals, but not marriages or deaths; I keep checking. In the past I've made a great number of family groups by reading the births in a town, each consistent with parents, while not finding a marriage for the parents in that some town. Recently I spent an entire weekend on FamilySearch, playing games with crazy spellings, in order to see if I could find a marriage.
This was a personal quest and would be extremely expensive if was working it for someone else, and entirely speculative. The fact is, if the marriages were up, I could likely focus on just one or two villages, and work the births of children from there.
So I suspect something secret is going on with Latter Day Saints and the Genealogy Business in general. So far everything is free, and there is a lot of contributory work. One person I know who indexed for FamilySearch is livid to find out his work has been given over to Ancestry - a fee based site. He says if he had been asked he would have said no, but at least he wouldn't feel so disrespected.
LDS ORG on MICROFILM DISCONTINUATION ANNOUNCMENT READ THE OFFICIAL ANNOUNCEMENT.
Another aspect of the wait until 2020 is that in that year the 1950 census should be at least begun, since the 70 year Privacy wait will be over. It will be a much larger project than the 1940 since this is the post World War II "babyboom" era.
From September 2017 till sometime in 2020 you can still pursue your genealogy but if what you need is not on the web site, don't forget the "old fashioned" methods!
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