The following is an announcement from the U.S. National Genealogical Society:
Arlington, VA – 11th August 2006
On 15 February 2006, the National Genealogical Society's massive collection of members' family group sheets (Member Ancestry Charts or MACs) became available online to NGS members as another free benefit of NGS membership. Thanks to a decade of dedicated work by over 100 NGS volunteers using a database designed by NGS member Linda Gouaze, plus an excellent online software application designed completely in-house by Gayathri Gopiram, NGS' Information Technology Specialist, the MAC collection is joining the Family Bible Records collection and the National Intelligencer abstracts in the rapidly expanding Members-Only section of the NGS Web site, http://www.ngsgenealogy.org.
The MAC database is more than an every-name index to the paper MAC collection: all name, date, and geographic location data for births, christenings, marriages, wills, deaths, burials, and probates was abstracted from each MAC. Still, not everything found on every MAC could be abstracted, so the MACs themselves will be scanned into PDF format and uploaded to the Web site, in the same way as original images of the NGS Family Bible Records collection have been made directly available to members online.
This member-searchable database of 66,000+ MACs covers the period from the early 1960s, when NGS first encouraged members to submit their family group sheets to NGS for sharing with all other members, to 31 Dec 1994, when this data entry project was implemented. [Note: The thousands of MACs submitted since 1994 will be added to the online database via a new project, about which more will be published soon.]
Loading of all of the MAC data into the online application began 2 January 2006 and is going smoothly and quickly. About 50 percent of the million+ records are currently available, but getting all 1.2 million people online will take months. So please be patient--and check back often for new MAC data!
It is not clear to me what the early 1960s mean.
Does it mean there are connected FGS that go back
to the ancients, or is some time in the 1960s the start time?
Posted by: Dave Cummins | August 12, 2006 at 09:41 AM
I don't understand how this is a free benifit when it costs $55?? ($50 if you're 65).
Posted by: Jerry Terry | August 12, 2006 at 11:30 AM
Understanding the requirement for joining to participate, still, will there be a list of the SURNAMES included in the 66,000+ MACs available free on its site?
Posted by: Barry Wetherington | August 13, 2006 at 12:22 AM