 |
| Are these your ancestors? |
My first class was New FamilySearch Record Innovations. This class discussed how records will be changing over the coming years. One thing they discussed was indexing. Last year there were 260 million records indexed by 327,696 indexers. In 2019, researchers will be able to thank the indexers for the records they worked on. Each indexed record will be linked to the indexers and arbitrator that worked on that record and there will be a Thank You button which the researcher can click to send a message to the indexers and arbitrator. This will probably be released sometime around July/August. Also, later this year, indexers will be able to take advantage of automatic name and place lookups. Names and place names will automatically be filled in as the indexer types the information for the record. This is currently in final testing. Additionally, there will be new ways to volunteer so that more indexers will be available to handle the increased number of digitized records. If you remember from my post yesterday, we are currently 40 years behind in indexing and each year enough new records are digitized to add another decade to the backlog. That means by the end of 2020 we will have a 60 year backlog of digitized images needing to be indexed. Another new item is that users will be able to edit records in the record details screen of the search results. This will start with being able to correct errors in names but will eventually expand to include places and other fields.
And what about all those unindexed records? There are currently 3.65 billion images available on FamilySearch. 1.36 billion of those images are browse only while 915.4 million of them are in the Family History Catalog. Only about 20% of the total number of images are indexed and that percentage is decreasing every year as new records are added. Currently it takes an average of 249 days for an image to go from digitization to being published on the FamilySearch website. Soon that time lag will be decreased to only 24 hours. Imagine that the images are scanned one day and available online the next day.
 |
| Explore Historical Images beta site |
Additionally, FamilySearch again reiterated their work with computer aided indexing. The computers aren't as accurate as human indexers but they can more quickly index large numbers of typed records. The example of the GenealogyBank Obituary Collection only taking 3 weeks to provide 50 million indexed records was discussed and they also announced plans to add another 38 million more records very soon.
 |
| Ancestry Labs beta projects |
Patricia Heaton, from Everybody Loves Raymond, finished off the General Session by talking about her family and the stories around them.
 |
| Henry Louis Gates, Jr. |
I thought Henry Louis Gates, Jr. made some very profound statements during this discussion. He said "One of the biggest misconceptions today is the idea of racial purity." The average African American is 25% European. He himself is 50% European based on his DNA. Even European Americans are mixed ethnicity, having portions of their DNA represented in several different countries. He also said "We are all united in our amnesia of our ancestors." At one time he thought the lack of knowledge of ones ancestors was specific to African Americans. He believed that they didn't know about their ancestors because of the impact of slavery but after researching the genealogies of various people for his TV shows, he realized that we all have a lack of knowledge that basically begins with our great grandparents lives. We have very little concept of who our ancestors were beginning only 3 generations ago. He believes that "Genealogy can revolutionize how we teach American and World History." If we realized how our ancestors were involved in history or affected by it, we would have a greater appreciation for the history that we study in schools.
As always, there was so much to learn today that I can't provide everything in just one blog. If you want to see some of the talks that were given this week, you can visit the RootsTech YouTube page at https://www.youtube.com/user/FamilySearch/videos. I hope this information is helpful to you. Now, it is time for me to get some sleep because tomorrow is another packed day. Goodnight!
1 comment:
I LOVE Railroad Ties, it was so well done!! How did I miss that Henry Louis Gates Jr was speaking at the Ancestry sponsored lunch?
It took me two whole days before I could figure out what the sashes on the dinosaurs said - they were always too far away and moved so much that I couldn't quite catch it. Haha.
Post a Comment