The BYU Linking Lab is producing some cutting edge products which will increase our ability to do family history in the future. The students manned their booth throughout the RootsTech conference and gave mini classes to explain the projects they are working on.
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| Reverse Indexing |
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| Mobile Indexing |
The Customized Hints application allows you to customize your hints by surname or location. Try adding a surname to see its distribution from a record set or research a place by putting in a county of your choice. The surname search might not provide many results since the project is in its early stages of development. If you use a place name the results will be mapped. For example, an enumeration district may be displayed with all the names collected in a census for that area mapped to their location. Clicking on the pins will let you see the surname of the person. When you click on the name you will see the record with a suggested match from the FamilySearch family tree. You can then connect that source to the family. This product makes it easy to develop geographic projects. For example, the Linking Lab has ongoing projects to help grow the family trees of African American families in the southeast US. The information on this project can be found in the African American Families Project.
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| Customized Hints - Shelby County, Ohio |
The Nauvoo Community Project is a project that collects data to identify the residents of Nauvoo, Illinois between 1839 and 1846. Each individual is supported by various records and linked to their PID number in FamilySearch. This project is searchable by name.
The First Vision Project is working to make sure all families living near the Palmyra, New York area in 1820 are included in the FamilySearch family tree. This is a difficult project since the 1820 census only included the head of household. Other family members have to be included from other sources.
The Helping New Converts project provides assistance to new converts to the LDS church. The goal is to find 100 temple ready family names for each new convert. Once the new convert has added sufficient information to get back to the 1940 census in their tree in FamilySearch, the RLL team can be contacted to help add more names. These instructions can also be used by Family History Consultants to do the project with the new convert.
The Museum Discovery Experience is currently being developed as a group on Relative Finder. The purpose of the project is to catalog people included in the displays in a museum so visitors can have a discovery experience and see if they have a connection to any of the people in the collections. Projects like this can be developed for any museum collection. The demonstration of this project contains the Maynard Dixon collection at the BYU Art Museum.
The RLL team has also developed a set of Service Projects. These projects can be adopted by youth or adult groups and can be customized for your area. The projects include Census-based Family Trees, Community Reconstitution Projects, World War I US Casualties, Saints by Sea Project, Virginia Funeral Programs, and others. You can use the instructions provided for each project to customize it for your area.
There are also ideas for Youth Projects that include mobile apps. These projects are quick and easy to perform and can be done a little bit at a time. The activities include attaching records on the FamilyTree app, using the Ordinance Ready function to prepare for temple experiences, use the Ralatives Around Me function to discover connections to others, add Tree Extending Hints, and upload photos and memories on the Memories app.
All of these projects are designed to involve you in easy to do activities that will enhance your family history experience. Try a few and see how quickly you can add names to the FamiySearch family tree.
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