FamilySearch Indexing hits milestone

David May 15th, 2008

FamilySearch IndexingTo date the FamilySearch Indexing program has registered over 140,000 volunteer indexers.  These individuals view batches of scanned census and other historical records and transcribe the handwritten text that they see.  These batches take an average of 30 minutes each, depending on the type of document and the difficulty in reading the text.

Between January 1 and May 6, 2008, these volunteers have indexed over 50 million names!  During the entire previous year, 95 million names were indexed.  These are amazing numbers and a testimony to the power of leveraging the strengths of your community.  Keep up the good work!  For anyone interested in participating, they continue to look for volunteers at http://www.familysearchindexing.org.  The data and images collected through FamilySearch indexing are available on the Record Search Web site at http://pilot.familysearch.org/recordsearch.

FamilySearch Developers Conference makes an impression

David March 13th, 2008

FamilySearch logoI attended the first annual FamilySearch Developers Conference in Provo, Utah yesterday at the BYU Conference Center. The FamilySearch Webservices team and 3rd party developers presented the basics of utilizing the API as well as examples and initial product offerings which will incorporate this functionality. It is my opinion that this will affect the entire genealogy research industry as much as the introduction of the GEDCOM standard did back in the 1980’s. Where the industry has made incremental improvements for researchers, the New FamilySearch (NFS) will change the way that genealogy is researched.

Although I haven’t developed an application using these resources prior to this conference, I have enrolled on the development site at http://devnet.familysearch.org and have reviewed the documentation.

Here are the sessions which I attended:

  1. Keynote - “Brave New Platform: Changing the World of Genealogy”, Ransom Love, director of strategic relationship, FamilySearch (LDS Church)
  2. “Family Tree, Authorities, Ordinance Reservation, Common Identity, and Future Opportunities”, Gordon Clarke, API and Third-Party Program Manager, FamilySearch (LDS Church)
  3. “GedLink”, John Finlay, professor at Neumont University and open source creator of PhpGedview.
  4. “PAFSDK”, Gaylon Findlay, creator of Ancestral Quest and PAF 4.0/5.0
  5. “PHP NFS Library”, John Finlay, professor at Neumont University and open source creator of PhpGedview.
  6. “Bungee Labs web framework”, Matt Misbach, BungeeConnect.com
  7. “FamilyTree Combine/Separate”, Rob Lyon, FamilySearch Web Services API Team Lead, FamilySearch (LDS Church)
  8. “Record Search”, Tim Crabb & Robert Lee, FamilySearch (LDS Church)