The company limped along in the early 1970s, pursuing things like rewritable microfilm with 3M.

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It is also putting all Spanish-era records on microfilm -- some 11 million documents.

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Run by the Mormon Church, it contains more than two billion names of the deceased, more than 2.2 million rolls of microfilm and 300, 000 books.

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After working as a microfilm processor in Denver, she retired to a century-old Messex home, formerly occupied by her parents, in 1996, joining a half dozen other residents.

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Mr. Berman, 44, recently combed through past phone books stored on microfilm at the New York Public Library as a way to track the growth of the city's pizza industry.

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Bush's essay was written more than 15 years before scientists patented the first integrated circuits, so the device he envisioned stored content on "improved microfilm" and allowed for direct data entry using a dry photography system.

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The campaign also did not look at news articles about Palin from the newspaper in her hometown of Basilar, Alaska, because it is kept on microfilm and was hard to view without compromising their secrecy.

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However, no amount of online searching, staring at microfilm or even a private luxury tour can match the actual discovery of, say, your great, great grandfather's headstone in the grounds of a tiny Devon chapel, or knocking on the door of that thatched village house that was home to your long-dead relatives.

BBC: A trip back to your roots