Image: Digital transformation concept — CC0 Public Domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.
There has never been a better time to be a genealogical researcher. That statement has been true for most of the past two decades, and it remains true in 2026 — but the pace of change in what records are accessible online, and how easily they can be searched, has accelerated dramatically in recent years. Billions of records that required a physical visit to an archive, a library, or a Family History Center a decade ago are now searchable from home, often for free. Artificial intelligence (AI) is making handwritten records searchable without manual indexing. Public-private partnerships are funding digitization at a scale no government could achieve alone. And platforms are expanding their reach into countries and record types that were previously dark territory for online genealogical research.
This article surveys the current state of record digitization across the major platforms — what has been accomplished, what is actively underway, where significant gaps remain, and what the next few years are likely to bring for researchers tracing lines in the United States, Britain, Ireland, Germany, and beyond.
The Scale of What’s Already Online
The sheer volume of digitized genealogical records now available is difficult to fully comprehend. As of early 2026:
Ancestry.com holds more than 65 billion records from 88 countries[1], making it the largest proprietary genealogical database in the world. In 2025 alone, Ancestry added 4.1 billion new historical records across 229 distinct new collections. In the first quarter of 2026, a further 35 new collections totaling 158 million individual records were added, along with updates to 68 existing collections adding 2.5 billion more records. Ancestry has committed to investing $450 million over the next 10 to 15 years in digitizing new records and applying AI to extract more accurate information from previously scanned material. The company’s CEO has noted that Ancestry’s staff photograph records at local archives daily — including Manhattan’s City Hall voting registers from the 1930s — uploading ten million new records to the site every single day.
FamilySearch added more than 2.2 billion new searchable names and images in 2025, bringing its total collection to over 22.7 billion records[2] from 170 countries and principalities. FamilySearch’s website received more than 297 million visits in 2025. The organization has completed digitization of all 2.4 million rolls of microfilm from the Granite Mountain Records Vault — a project that began in earnest in the 1990s and was fully completed in September 2021 — representing over 1.5 billion images. Not all of these are freely available online due to contractual restrictions, but the physical preservation is complete.
MyHeritage holds 39.6 billion historical records as of 2026, with particular strength in European records, Jewish genealogy collections, and increasingly robust coverage of Central and Eastern Europe.
Findmypast has surpassed 100 million fully searchable digitized newspaper pages[3] in its British Newspaper Archive, in partnership with the British Library — a milestone reached in early 2026. The platform continues to add British, Irish, and Commonwealth records at a steady pace, with particular depth in parish registers, census records, and military collections for the United Kingdom (UK) and Ireland.
🔍 The AI Searchability Revolution
The most consequential development in record accessibility in recent years is not the digitization of new records — it is the application of AI to make existing digitized records searchable without manual indexing. This distinction matters enormously in practice.
For most of the history of online genealogical databases, a digitized record was only searchable if a human had manually read it and typed its contents into a database — a process called indexing. Vast collections of scanned images existed online but were effectively invisible to name searches because they had never been indexed. Browsing through these collections required viewing each image individually, page by page.
FamilySearch’s Full-Text Search, developed using AI-powered Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR), has changed this. The tool makes handwriting in digital images of historical records as easily searchable as if they had been professionally indexed — without requiring manual transcription. As of 2025, FamilySearch has applied Full-Text Search to nearly two billion[4] records that were previously browse-only, with more being added regularly. The practical effect is that collections which previously required page-by-page browsing can now be searched by name in seconds. FamilySearch has committed to expanding Full-Text Search to additional collections and handwritten languages in 2026.
Ancestry has made a parallel commitment. In its first quarter 2026 update, Ancestry noted that ten additional collections had been newly enabled for full-text search — representing billions of previously unsearchable images now opening to name-based discovery. This trend represents perhaps the single largest expansion of effective record access in the history of genealogical research, because it unlocks records that have technically been “online” for years but were practically inaccessible without knowing exactly where to look.
Major Digitization Projects Currently Underway
Ancestry and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA): In May 2024, Ancestry and NARA announced the largest archive collaboration[5] in Ancestry’s history. The first phase will digitize more than 65.5 million records previously unavailable online, including World War II (WWII) U.S. Morning Reports, Korean War era Selective Service draft cards, naturalization and immigration records, Asian American records, and Native American records. These records will be accessible through Ancestry’s platform before eventually moving to the publicly accessible NARA database. NARA’s separately operated digitization center in College Park, Maryland — equipped with high-speed scanners capable of processing records up to ten times faster than previous equipment — is working toward a goal of making 500 million pages of records publicly available by September 2026.
Findmypast’s British Newspaper Archive expansion: Following its 100 million page milestone, Findmypast announced in March 2026 that it would increase its digitization studio output by more than 60% for paper titles and over 80% for microfilm titles over the next three to four years. The expansion focuses particularly on under-represented Commonwealth and South Asian newspapers held by the British Library — addressing a long-standing gap in the historical record for South Asian diaspora communities in the UK, North America, and beyond. Findmypast is also working with Reach PLC, the UK’s largest commercial national and regional news publisher, to digitize its collections, and with National World, which holds more than 100 historical British and Irish newspaper titles.
FamilySearch European records: FamilySearch has committed to significant expansion of records from France, Germany, Honduras, Italy, Palau, and the Philippines in 2025 and 2026, following major updates to collections from Brazil, France, the Philippines, and Venezuela in 2025. The organization is also continuing to publish oral genealogies gathered from tribal leaders across 25 African countries, making lineages searchable online for the first time.
Matricula and European Catholic church records: Matricula (matricula-online.eu) is an independent platform digitizing Catholic church records from dioceses across Austria, Germany, Italy, Poland, Slovenia, and other Central European countries. For researchers with Catholic ancestors in these regions — a category that includes many Dillman Family Association (DFA) members with German and Swiss roots — Matricula is an increasingly important resource. Progress varies significantly by diocese; some are fully digitized while others are years from completion. The platform is free to access and contains records not available anywhere else.
Archion and German Protestant church records: Archion (archion.de) digitizes Lutheran and Reformed church records from German states, with particular coverage of Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, Hesse, and Rhineland. Unlike Matricula, Archion requires a paid subscription to view full records, though preview images are available free. For DFA members tracing Protestant Dillman lines in Germany, Archion is a primary resource for pre-civil-registration church records.
What Remains Offline — and Why
Despite the extraordinary progress in digitization, substantial collections of genealogically important records remain inaccessible online. Understanding why helps researchers know where to focus in-person research efforts.
Contractual and privacy restrictions. Many records were digitized years ago under agreements that permitted viewing only at FamilySearch Centers or affiliate libraries — not from home. These restrictions are negotiated with the original record custodians, which may be government archives, church authorities, or civil registration offices. Renegotiating them is a slow, country-by-country, archive-by-archive process. German data privacy regulations, for example, have kept some German church and civil records restricted to in-person viewing despite being digitized. FamilySearch is actively working to expand home access as contracts come up for renewal, but progress varies.
Records that have never been digitized. The digitized records that researchers can access online represent only a fraction of surviving historical documentation. Vast collections of local court records, estate inventories, church account books, land surveys, military pension files, and private family papers remain in physical archives, often uncatalogued. No digital camera has photographed them; no algorithm has read them. These records require a physical visit to the holding archive — and finding them in the first place requires knowing which archive holds what.
Records that were destroyed before digitization. Ireland’s Four Courts fire of 1922, which destroyed the Public Record Office of Ireland and with it census records, wills, and other irreplaceable documents, is the most dramatic example — but courthouse fires, floods, wars, and neglect have eliminated records worldwide. No digitization effort can recover what no longer exists.
Locally held records. An enormous volume of genealogically significant material is held by county courthouses, local historical societies, religious congregations, and private institutions that lack the resources to digitize their holdings. Ancestry’s CEO described photographing Manhattan City Hall’s voting registers precisely because those records were held locally with no digitization budget. Systematic digitization of locally held records depends on either the resources of the holding institution or a partnership with a commercial or nonprofit digitization program — and many institutions simply have neither.
What This Means for Dillman Researchers
For DFA members tracing Dillman lines in Germany and Switzerland, the record landscape in 2026 is substantially better than it was five years ago — but significant gaps remain. The key resources worth knowing about:
FamilySearch’s German collections have grown considerably, particularly for Lutheran church records from many German states. FamilySearch’s Full-Text Search is gradually being applied to these collections, making them searchable by name rather than requiring page-by-page browsing. For areas not yet fully covered by FamilySearch, Archion (for Protestant records) and Matricula (for Catholic records) fill important gaps — though both require familiarity with German church record formats and, in Archion’s case, a paid subscription.
Ancestry’s NARA collaboration is primarily US-focused, but the immigration and naturalization records in the first phase — including those from the late 19th and early 20th centuries — are directly relevant for tracing Dillman ancestors who emigrated to the United States. These records can document the specific German village of origin for an immigrant, providing the bridge between American and German research.
For newspaper research, Newspapers.com (an Ancestry company) and GenealogyBank provide access to American newspaper archives that frequently contain obituaries, arrival notices, and family announcements for German-American communities in Indiana, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and other states with significant Dillman populations. These collections continue to grow rapidly.
The Dillman DNA Project coordinates genetic genealogy research that complements documentary research — and as records come online that document specific Dillman migration routes and family connections, combining DNA evidence with newly accessible records becomes increasingly productive.
Looking Ahead
The pace of record digitization is not slowing — if anything, it is accelerating. AI-assisted HTR is reducing the cost and time required to make handwritten records searchable. Public-private partnerships are funding projects that no single institution could sustain. Cloud storage costs continue to fall, making the preservation and distribution of digitized images cheaper every year.
The meaningful remaining challenges are not primarily technological. They are legal (negotiating access restrictions with record custodians), institutional (persuading local archives to participate in digitization programs), and financial (funding the digitization of low-demand collections that commercial platforms cannot justify on business grounds). Government digitization programs — like NARA’s 500 million page initiative — are essential for the records that commercial platforms won’t prioritize.
For the intermediate genealogist, the practical implication is clear: check the online databases before planning any in-person research trip. Collections that weren’t online last year may well be online today. And collections that are online but weren’t searchable — particularly at FamilySearch — may have become findable through Full-Text Search without any announcement. Staying current with what has been digitized is itself a research skill worth cultivating.
Sources
- Ancestry, “Ancestry Facts,” ancestry.com/corporate/about-ancestry/company-facts (accessed May 2026).
- FamilySearch, “2025 Annual Statistics,” familysearch.org/en/about/newsroom (accessed May 2026).
- Findmypast, “British Newspaper Archive — 100 Million Pages,” March 2026, findmypast.com/blog (accessed May 2026).
- FamilySearch, “Full-Text Search,” familysearch.org (accessed May 2026).
- Ancestry, “Ancestry and NARA Partnership,” May 2024, ancestry.com/corporate/newsroom (accessed May 2026).
AI Disclosure: This article was researched and written with the assistance of Claude, an AI assistant developed by Anthropic. All facts have been reviewed for accuracy, but readers are encouraged to verify information independently, particularly for time-sensitive details such as record counts, collection availability, and project timelines.
Discover more from Dillman Family Association
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.