FamilySearch new historical records add 18 million free indexed entries from 10 countries, giving Michigan families new ways to track immigrant roots without a paywall.
FamilySearch, one of the world’s biggest genealogy platforms, has quietly rolled out more than 18 million new indexed records from 10 countries, a November update that could reshape how Michigan families trace their immigrant stories. The free collections range from Italian civil registration to Dominican Republic immigration files and national identity cards from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The records are part of a regular expansion on FamilySearch.org, the nonprofit site sponsored by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and offered free to users worldwide.
FamilySearch new historical records highlight Italian, Caribbean and African sources in November 2025
In its November 3 update, FamilySearch reports “over 18 million new records from 10 countries,” led by roughly 12 million civil and church entries from Italy, about 8 million civil and immigration records from the Dominican Republic, and 2,051,511 entries from national identity cards in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The Italian expansion alone reads like a road map to southern European migration. New or enlarged sets include:
- Italy, Parma, Civil Registration (State Archive), 1626–1921, with more than 2.24 million indexed records.
- Italy, Reggio Calabria, Civil Registration (State Archive), 1784–1943, at nearly 1.93 million entries.
- Italy, Teramo, Civil Registration (State Archive), 1809–1936, with about 1.19 million indexed records.
Smaller but still important additions stretch from Napoli and Palermo to Verona, covering births, marriages and deaths across the 19th and early 20th centuries.
The Dominican Republic update centers on:
- Dominican Republic, Civil Registration, 1744–2019, with 8,211,089 indexed records.
- Dominican Republic, Immigration Records, 1925–1999.
These provide rare coverage for a country where earlier documentation has often been difficult to reach from the United States.
In Africa, Democratic Republic of the Congo, National Identity Cards, 1884–2019, adds more than 2 million entries, tying individuals to addresses, occupations and sometimes family relationships across colonial and post-colonial eras.
Other November gains include:
- Philippines Civil Registration (National), 1945–1996, with more than 1.5 million entries.
- Expanded civil registration sets for Belgium (Antwerp and Namur) and French Polynesia.
- Targeted U.S. county-level collections: obituaries from southeast Idaho, naturalization records in Illinois counties, marriage records in Harrison County, Indiana, and historic vital records from Maine.
Most are flagged as an “expanded collection,” meaning more names have been indexed from existing digitized images, making them searchable rather than buried frame by frame on microfilm-era scans.
FamilySearch new historical records matter for Michigan’s immigrant story, even without a new state collection
Michigan does not get a fresh, state-branded collection in this particular update. The United States gains are focused elsewhere. Yet for Michigan readers, especially those with roots in Detroit, Hamtramck, Macomb County or the Upper Peninsula, the most important November records may come from overseas.
A teacher resource guide from the Lorenzo Cultural Center notes that more than 400,000 Italians live in Michigan, and that Detroit once hosted a “Little Italy” along Gratiot Avenue and its side streets. A recent analysis in the Detroit Free Press reported that 4.5 percent of Michigan residents claimed Italian ancestry in the 2000 Census, and that Italian surnames and place names are embedded across the state map.
For those families, a civil registration volume from Parma or Reggio Calabria can be more crucial than another Michigan index. These registers list parents, witnesses and home villages—details that can bridge the gap between a Detroit-area death certificate and a village street in southern Italy.
The same logic applies to Michigan’s Caribbean and African communities. For decades, Metro Detroit and other cities have drawn immigrants from Latin America and Africa, reshaping neighborhoods, congregations and school districts. While the November FamilySearch new historical records update does not create a “Detroit” collection, it gives those households a way to connect U.S. immigration papers, passenger lists and naturalization records to birth and identity records in the countries they left behind.
Here is the counterintuitive twist: for many Michigan families, the records that move their research forward this month are not stamped “Michigan” at all. They sit in Italian parish books, Dominican civil ledgers or Congolese ID files, and they only make sense once paired with local resources such as Detroit-area passenger and border-crossing records that track who entered the city from Canada between 1905 and 1954.
FamilySearch new historical records build on a global, always-free platform used across Michigan
FamilySearch describes itself as an international, nonprofit genealogy organization that offers free access to billions of historical records and an open, collaborative family tree. Operated by the Church’s Family History Department, it has spent more than a century collecting and digitizing records worldwide.
According to the site’s own overview, the FamilySearch new historical records platform houses billions of digital images—ranging from parish books and civil registers to digitized books and microfilm—and allows users to attach these records to a shared global tree that now includes more than 1.5 billion profiles.
In 2025 alone, FamilySearch has announced monthly surges of new content: hundreds of millions of records from dozens of countries in the spring, and tens of millions more in subsequent months. The November bulletin continues that pattern at a smaller scale, with a strong tilt toward Italian civil registration and long-running civil series in Latin America and the Pacific.
