When Typhoon Haiyan — known locally as Typhoon Yolanda — wreaked its devastation in the Philippines a year ago, government officials in four cities thought the loss included irreplaceable civil records.
What they hadn’t counted on was a godsend: the Church’s international genealogical organization known as FamilySearch.
Having digitally captured the records, FamilySearch recently donated copies back to the cities where the records had been copied: Tacloban and the smaller municipalities of Guiuan, Hernani and Marabut, located on the island of Samar.