Let us all close our eyes and take a breath: The End of the Microfilm Lending Program
Let us not panic. OK? The LDS Church, through it's Family Search web site has announced that its long standing microfilm lending program is coming to an end. The final ship out date is August 31, 2017. Requests for films and orders received after that date will not be fulfilled. Family Search estimates that the remainder of its rolls that have not been transitioned to electronic images should be complete sometime in 2020. Many genealogical web sites have reprinted the press release, so I am not going to do that here, but the links are at the bottom of this post. What I am going to do is try and explain why I think this is being done now, and why this is for the best. First of all, the most important collections to the great number of people are online, free for you to access right now. www.familysearch.org is an amazing resource. What hasn't been put online is everything else that have. Because getting a confident answer from anyone in...