On this day in 2006, the Utah State Archives quietly released the results of a partnership with FamilySearch: fifty years of Utah death certificates free and online.

The project was essentially an experiment to bring together indexes, including those produced by records custodians such as the Utah Office of Vital Records, and digital images created by volunteers from the then-named Genealogical Society of Utah, with new and innovative linking technologies. A press release began circulating in late January 2007 and the future soon arrived in the form of hundreds of thousands of searches and downloads.

Close to a million more items have been added online in the Digital Archives since then, including the first Utah birth certificates in 2010. We’ve heard from so many visitors how much they love this collection, and we look forward to adding so much more in the next ten years and beyond.