Later this decision was reversed and the Family History Department was separated from the Church History Department, becoming its own department. In 2008, the Vatican issued a statement calling the practice known as baptism for the dead "erroneous" and directing its dioceses to keep parish records from Latter-day Saints performing genealogical research. Presidents of the Genealogical Society of Utah FamilySearch In 1998, the GSU began digital imaging of records and in about August 1998 the decision was made by LDS Church leaders to build a genealogical website. In May 1999, the website first opened to the public as FamilySearch. The beta version, released April 1, almost immediately went off-line, overloaded because of high popularity. Only a few days after the official launch, the website had received an estimated 100 million hits. To handle the load, site visitors were only given access to the site for 15 minutes at a time. In November 1999, 240 million names were added, bringing the total number of entries to 640 million. In 2009, the LDS Church launched a collaborative tree known as "New FamilySearch." It was the precursor to the current "FamilySearch Family Tree," and was only available to church members. The system was an attempt to combine multiple genealogical submissions to FamilySearch's databases into one single tree, but it did not allow users to edit information that they had not submitted. It also was difficult to add sources to individuals in the tree or determine what was the correct information among multiple submissions. By April 2011, plans were in place to redesign the database into a more collaborative platform. In 2011, the FamilySearch website received a major redesign. The previous site had allowed users to only search one database at a time, but the new version allowed sitewide searches of multiple databases. It also included the addition of more databases as well as some digitized and indexed microfilms. On 16 November 2012, it was announced that the new Family Tree database would be available to all users of New FamilySearch, and that the New FamilySearch database would eventually be phased out. On 5 March 2013, it was announced that Family Tree would now be available to everyone, whether or not they were members of the LDS Church. On 16 April 2013 FamilySearch completely revamped the site design generally, with new features and a changed color scheme. Some of the new features include an