RootsTech2020 Follow Up - BYU Record Linking Lab

Good morning, it has now been three days since RootsTech and one day since I arrived back home from the trip to Salt Lake City. As I get caught up on the sleep I missed while at the conference, I will continue to try to blog about some of the products that I saw while at RootsTech.

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.

Reverse Indexing

Reverse Indexing is a new tool that uses handwriting recognition technology to increase the speed at which indexing takes place. You can select the surname you want to index and the computer will display up to 12 occurrences of that surname. It is your task to read through these suggestions and determine if any of them are incorrect. By selecting the incorrect surnames, the computer is being taught how to make better selections. One of the things I like about this product is that you can select the surnames you want to index. If you run out of records for that surname, switch to another surname that you are interested in. Come back later to see if more records are available for your selected surnames. This means that the surnames you are researching can get finished quicker.

Mobile Indexing

Mobile Indexing is another test platform for the computer handwriting recognition software. This application provides one scanned name and several possible matches. You are asked to select the name that matches the image. If none of the names match the image, you can add your own.

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.

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.Enable GingerCannot connect to Ginger Check your internet connection
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What’s New In FamilySearch 2019-2020

Did you know that FamilySearch International, formerly known as the Genealogical Society of Utah, celebrated its 125th anniversary in 2019 and that the FamilySearch website is now 20 years old? It seems like just yesterday (1999) when FamilySearch.org first opened its website to fanfare and a rush of users and then promptly crashed due to the unexpected stampede of enthusiastic genealogists. During all those years, FamilySearch has been an innovator and leader in the genealogy world, transforming the way we do family history research while providing access to billions of records.

So, what happened in 2019? First of all, the number of registered users for the FamilySearch website grew by over 2 million from 11.8 million in 2018, to 13.9 million in 2019. Those users contributed 72 million new individuals and 262.5 million sources to the Family Tree. In addition to that, the users contributed more than 8.75 million photos, stories, documents, and recordings from their own collections to the Memories in Family Tree. FamilySearch also did its part by adding more than 123 million name-searchable records and another 832.5 million new record images to their collection. All of these sources and records help to build and prove the relationships between people and contribute to “The Story of You”, the theme for RootsTech 2020, through encouraging people to discover who they are by bridging the gap between the past and future.  

Beyond just adding records, FamilySearch also provided some upgrades and improvements to their website. One of these additions was the long awaited ability to edit indexed names for some records. This allowed the users to correct indexing errors as well as errors in original documents by editing the names. Future improvements in editing, expected in 2020, will allow for dates and places to be editable.

There were also some additions to the ways families are presented in the Family Tree. Now, same sex marriages can be added as well as indicating “no marriage” and “no children” events between couples. These will help reduce the number of notifications and research tips users receive.

We are all grateful for the work done by others, whether that be indexers or fellow researchers, to help build our family trees. Now, we are able to express our thanks. When viewing the indexed information for a record you will see a box in the lower left indicating that the record was indexed by a volunteer. You can then click on “Thank the volunteer” and send them a short message. Also, occasionally, you may see a popup which informs you of the top contributors in your family line and provides a way to thank them for their work.

Another new feature is the ability to see how you are related to a contributor. Many times we get messages from other users asking how we are related to the family. Now they can just click on the contributors name and see that connection, if the contributor has their relationship indicator turned on. This can be found in your user profile, just click the box to turn it on.

Also, new advancements in computer learning are pushing the boundaries of technology. BYU Linking Labs is working on several huge projects. One is the Community Reconstitution Project. This project works to reconstitute communities (groups of people, populations of towns or counties, etc.) by pulling names from record sets. Another is the Census Tree Project. They presented this project at RootsTech 2019. The project links the 188 million people that lived in the US between 1900 and 1940 across the census records. In my opinion, the most amazing project they are working on currently is the Automated Indexing Project. This project provides the technology necessary to automatically index records, including handwritten records. They recently completed indexing the 122 million people in the 1930 US Census and are also working on the 1940 US Census and Ohio death records. Volunteers can help teach the AI computers by using the app located at bit.ly/rll-index. 

These are just a few of the many updates in FamilySearch during 2019 but what can we expect in 2020? Well, we should see improvements in the merging features. Some of us have already seen this improvements as it was tested with random users last fall. There will be new ways for us to manage and share our Memories. We will be able to better track our contributions to the Family Tree, and there will be an increase in our ability to find new records. The Explore Images tool will open up new digitized records within days of the records being collected. 2020 will be another groundbreaking year in family history research at FamilySearch.

To read more details about these improvements visit the following pages:

FamilySearch 2019 Genealogy Highlights

FamilySearch Updates Enhance Your Experience

See How You Are elated to Other Users - FamilySearch Update

What to Expect from FamilySearch in 2020

What's Coming to FamilySearch in 2020

BYU Linking Labs Projects

BYU RLL Hints App

BYU Record Linking Labs Facebook Page