How can you ignore a database with nearly half a billion records?
The MyHeritage collection Historical Books – Index of Authors and People Mentioned, 1811-2003 names persons mentioned in various English-language public domain books as well as the names of authors of these publications. It has 494,147,034 entries from over three million digitized books.
The index includes the following searchable information: the title and the year of publication, name of the author(s), birth and death year of the author(s), the names of all the individuals mentioned in the publication, the publisher and the subject(s) of the publication can also be found in most records.
I started checking other large databases. Here are the results – an odd mixture.
| Organization | Database | Items | Comment |
| Internet Archive | Wayback Machine | 806,000,000,000 | web pages |
| Alphabet | 500,000,000,000 | words | |
| MyHeritage | MyHeritage Family Trees | 5,464,569,377 |
Likely has many dupllicates
|
| MyHeritage | Newspaper Name Index, USA and Canada | 2,300,027,369 | |
| Ancestry | Public Member Trees | 1,895,402,199 | |
| Ancestry | Geneanet Community Trees Index | 1,525,138,110 | |
| Ancestry | Private Member Trees | 1,515,901,512 | |
| Ancestry | U.S., City Directories, 1822-1995 | 1,385,585,017 | |
| FamilySearch | Tree | 1.300,000,000 |
Individuals, no duplicates?
|
| Ancestry | California, U.S., Newspapers.com™ Stories and Events Index | 1,067,030,708 | |
| Ancestry | U.S., Newspapers.com™ Obituary Index, 1800s-current | 1,056,609,084 | |
| MyHeritage | FamilySearch Family Tree | 1,056,564,440 |
Individuals, no duplicates?
|
| Ancestry | Florida, U.S., Newspapers.com™ Stories and Events Index, 1800’s-current | 957,954,239 | |
| FamilySearch | International Genealogical Index (IGI) | 892,761,439 | |
| FamilySearch | United States Public Records, 1970-2009 | 875,610,137 | |
| Ancestry | U.S., School Yearbooks, 1900-2016 | 864,610,581 | |
| MyHeritage | U.S. Public Records Index | 816,043,390 | |
| MyHeritage | U.S. City Directories | 561,496,413 | |
| OCLC | WorldCat | 540,000,000 |
bibliographic records
|
| MyHeritage | Historical Books – Index of Authors and People Mentioned, 1811-2003 | 494,147,034 | |
| Ancestry | Ohio, U.S., Newspapers.com™ Stories and Events Index, 1800s-current | 452,250,767 |
While The Wayback Machine is in first place, there’s a lot of repitition as it archives web pages many times. The 534 times bifhsgo.ca has been saved between 25 October 2001 and 19 March 2023 means there’s a lot of duplication.
If size matters this reinforces the importance of using Google, or a general search engine.
Looking down the list you will see titles for places with no connection to your family history. For those size doesn’t matter, but maybe you’re looking for someone who dissappeared to end up who knows where.
Unfortunately, there are plenty of duplicates on the FamilySearch Family Tree (and WikiTree). Some entries have so little information. Plenty of merging and connecting opportunities!