LDS Tech

David May 20th, 2008

The LDS Church has received great appreciation for its efforts from Hurricane Katrina.  President Henry B. Eyring even mentioned a personal phone call from Pres George W. Bush to Gordon B. Hinckley at a recent multi-Stake Conference address, admiring the quick and effective efforts of local church members.  But even the best organizations would be amiss if they didn’t take advantage of what they may learn from others.

With thousands of people affected by the Sichuan, China earthquake, Google China staff members rolled up their sleeves and joined other rescue organizations.

At the request of the government, we obtained new satellite images of Sichuan province (Earth KML) to help them better focus their recovery efforts. We developed and launched a “lost loved one” search based on our Custom Search Engine (CSE). To populate the CSE index, hundreds of Googlers worked around the clock looking through published tables, hospital records, news reports, and community sites. We tuned our Chinese news search, video search, image search, blog search, and oneboxes. We also partnered to build community sites, and launched both homepage promotions and a map-based information page. Google China has an extremely dedicated and passionate team and I am deeply honored to work alongside them.

Google has also set up a donation page so that you can donate directly towards recovery efforts.  Similarly, donations can be made on the LDS Philanthropies donation page for any of the humanitarian projects around the world or using a donation slip at your local congregation.

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David May 13th, 2008

John Finlay, founder of the popular PhpGedview open source web genealogy application, has launched GedLynk, an open source Java based desktop utility to synchronize and merge genealogy data with New FamilySearch (NFS) as well as PhpGedview web sites.  It is still in early beta, but it already looks promising.  I saw a demonstration of this utility at the NFS API Conference in March 2007, while the GedLynk site has launched this past week (May 8). 

Without using a NFS utility, a person has limited options for adding data to New FamilySearch.  These include manually adding each individual record using the forms on the web site itself, searching for existing or duplicate data which represent the same individual, or uploading a GEDCOM file with this data included.  By synchronizing data using an NFS utility, the selected record in your personal data file will be compared with the data available at NFS.  New online information available can be downloaded and while missing online data can be uploaded to NFS.  Utilities which can synchronize entire files of data will not be available for some time.

The following individuals and organizations are currently listed as Web Service Affiliates with New FamilySearch, suggesting that they are actively working on products or services which will interface with NFS: FamilyPursuit, Generation Maps, Incline Software (Ancestral Quest), Bungee Labs, Bruce Rogers (Kin2Me), Millennia (Legacy Family Tree), Progeny Software, RootsMagic, US FamilyTree, Ohana Software, World Vital Records / Family Link, One Great Family, nGenisis, LLC, RedBugz Software, Living Genealogy, R.C. Martin, Peter Ivie, US Family Tree, Universital, and Walter Sorenson. 

I haven’t heard if any of these companies or individuals are also releasing beta versions of their software, so please post a reply to this post if you happen to know about any beta software that is available which supports the New FamilySearch. 

• Genealogy , General Technology
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David May 9th, 2008

From Jimmy Zimmerman, FamilySearch Developer Support, comes the relaunch of the FamilySearch DevNet site http://devnet.familysearch.org.  This site will be used by developers who intend to use the FamilySearch API to create web sites and software.  These APIs permit 3rd party tools to search, update, and insert records in the new FamilySearch database.

The content has been reorganized, which should help you find content faster.

FAQs are beginning to populate, so you can find answers to common questions on that tab.

The Events tab now has a page "All Recorded Presentations" which will link to all of the public, recorded presentations. Now you can access all recordings from one place without having to dig through past events.

The Downloads tab has an area for third-party software. Project owners will be given rights to manage their own page for their project. If you have a project that you would like to have posted here, please email devnet@familysearch.org.

We are putting an end to the life of the Basic Client. We will provide how-to articles for using tools like Poster. We may still post the source to the Basic Client on the site, but we will no longer be supporting it.

If you experience any problems with the new site, or find any broken links, please email devnet@familysearch.org.

I have been using PhpGedView for my family genealogy site, which should have new FamilySearch integration with the next major release of the software.  I haven’t been using these APIs yet myself, but I am interested in doing so.

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David May 5th, 2008

What may be a blow to LDS Church efforts to digitize and index historical records, the Vatican has sent a letter to diocese around the world to not share parish records with members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.  From the Deseret News (May 4),

… the Vatican had "grave reservations" about the LDS Church’s practice of posthumous baptisms by proxy, a practice in which the names of the deceased are baptized into the LDS faith so that they may be united in the afterlife with LDS families, if they so choose.

The LDS Church has not made a statement yet regarding this issue. 

Church spokesman Mike Otterson said the church may have more to say on the subject later in the week and that LDS officials had not yet made contact with Vatican representatives about the issue.

After having several instances where Jewish individuals have escalated concerns regarding LDS baptism of Jewish holocaust victims (see Deseret News, Dec 19 2006), this could also impact the Church’s relations with other organized religions.

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David April 14th, 2008

Genealogy expert, DearMYRTLE, raised a concern about my previous quote regarding PAF.  She did some research into whether my sources were considered "official" or not.  Contacting Gordon Clarke, LDS Family History Department, directly she found that Paul Nauta was the only person who can make "official" statements such as this. 

I’ll concede that this statement on the future of PAF is a bit premature for the general public.  Nevertheless, for software engineers who will be using the New FamilySearch API or the PAF API to create plugins for PAF, this statement from the Family History department makes some good suggestions for how new products can complement the technology offerings which the LDS Church has made and will be making to the community.  The Ancestry Insider has offered some additional insights into specific areas of this message.

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David March 31st, 2008

Today FamilySearch has released news regarding future support for PAF.  The decision to not expand PAF’s functionality to interface with the new FamilySearch doesn’t come as a surprise to me. The Church isn’t in the business of commercial software. Did you know that the Windows version of PAF was adopted from a previous version of Ancestral Quest? (See Information for Users of PAF) In addition, years ago the Church has opened up the PAF API to commercial developer to create add-on applications, such as PAF Insight.  The new FamilySearch will have public APIs so that these competing commercial products will have access as well as PAF add-on products so that users most comfortable with the existing PAF interface can continue to use it for years to come.

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David March 27th, 2008

Despite their ideological differences, genealogists have found that the leading US presidential candidates are tied more closely than previously thought. Barack Obama is a distant to cousin to the current President George W. Bush and the former British Prime Minister, Winston Churchhill. Senator John McCain is related to the current first lady, Laura Bush. Senator Hillary Clinton has ties to entertainers Celine Dion and Madonna. (See CNN, Family ties: Candidates’ ancestry makes for strange bedfellows)

The New England Historic Genealogical Society, founded in 1845, says it is the oldest such organization in the country. Members spent three years tracing the lineage of the candidates. … Most surprisingly, Obama — the man who could become America’s first African-American president — is linked by ancestry to Robert E. Lee, who commanded the armies of the Southern slave-holding states during the American civil war.

You don’t have to be a presidential candidate to be able to look up your ancestry easily. Digital Roots, a BYU Computer Science research foundation, has created Relationship Finder. This tool duplicates the years of research that the NEHGS did for the presidential candidates in only a matter of seconds. For its data it uses the Ancestral File, so if you don’t have family members who have contributed data to this previously, you won’t get many results. [Note: You’ll need the Ancestral File Number (AFN) from as many of your last three or four generations of ancestors as you have available as input for this search. You can look this up at FamilySearch.org.] Give it a try, you’ll be surprised at how many people you are related to!

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David March 26th, 2008

Lindon, Utah based Footnote launched January 2007 and has grown to become a favorite resource for avid genealogists. What makes them different from other sites like Ancestry or WorldVitalRecords is it’s expanded resources beyond traditional records. For example,

Footnote has taken the initiative to digitize all 58,000 names inscribed into the Vietnam War Memorial. It has also correlated them with military personnel records from the National Archives and made this information searchable from within an interactive Flash application.

It is the extra steps that they have taken from public data which we already had access to, but correlating it and indexing it that makes this a unique resource.

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David March 22nd, 2008

As a family history consultant, this morning I attended a training class offered by the Salt Lake Family History Center on the new FamilySearch (NFS) site. Rather than offering a complete site training, this was more of an introduction to the site features and the training resources that are available.

To access the available training as a family history consultant or priesthood leader, each person must register at the appropriate site. General church membership will have to wait until NFS is available in their temple district. The general public will have to wait until NFS 1.0 is released (delivery date hasn’t been announced). Note that to register, you will need your membership number, confirmation date, and unit number.

• http://consultant.familysearch.org
• http://priesthood.familysearch.org

You will be notified within a few days once your registration has been validated, and you will have access to role-specific training at https://lds.netdimensions.com. Within 90 days of the NFS being made available in your area, you will be notified via email to register and begin additional training at http://new.familysearch.org.

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David March 21st, 2008

Last night I attended the Utah Java Users Group (UJUG) meeting and heard a presentation by senior developers and leadership from the LDS Church FamilySearch Digital Pipeline teams. I believe that it is certainly worth mentioning.

To give you a little background…

If you haven’t had a chance to see how the Google Books indexing project is coming along, take a look. They are taking scanners into university libraries across the US and scanning and indexing the full text. Not all of this is searchable online because of copyright issues but nevertheless huge number of books are now available because the copyright is out of date or because the publisher has granted Google rights to make them available.

The LDS Church has been scanning historical documents since the 1930s onto microfilm and microfiche and stored them at the Granite Mountain Vault for safekeeping. Now they are digitizing these scanned records as well as digitizing other records as they become available.

FamilySearch Indexing

With the newest scanning technology, they anticipate being able to completely scan all documents in the vault in 8 to 10 years. With terabytes of digitized images of censuses, birth / marriage / death certificates, and other records, the next step is to index this data. The technology for automatic indexing of handwritten documents is still not ready for production use but when you have an army of 130,000+ volunteers, you can utilize the strengths of technology to present the necessary information quickly and use the strengths of individuals to identify handwritten text. Doing so, they have been able to index up to 500,000 names per day. This includes double entry (two separate extractors) and arbitration if the data doesn’t match perfectly.

The Granite Mountain Vault isn’t the only digital data that is being processed by this program. Several US states have donated their records to the Family History Department to scan and preserve their data. The LDS Church is under negotiations with other public entities to extend the records that will be available. If you want to participate in this program, go to http://familysearchindexing.org. Don’t worry, they won’t run out of work for you to do any time soon!

FamilySearch Record Search

Although this isn’t open for public beta yet (summer 2008) all of the records that these volunteers are indexing are already available at http://search.labs.familysearch.org. They have developed Rich Internet Applications (RIA) utilizing a RESTful Web Services framework running on Java and open source technologies. They are building a highly scalable, parallel architecture to handle 100 requests per second (currently handling 80/sec). The presenter, Rob Edwards, said that in early negotiations with a 3rd party development company who supports eBay Japan (their architecture handles 3 requests per second) walked away from negotiations because they didn’t believe that their technology would handle so many more transactions.

They didn’t say this, but in a competitive work environment I’m sure that many companies are trying to recruit developers from these teams because they have been able to solve problems top companies are currently facing. Did I say that they are hiring?

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