FamilySearch Record Hinting and Linking: Source-centric debut

Today is a great day, because FamilySearch has finally released its "record hinting" feature. When you go to a person page in Family Tree, there is now a little section on the right that shows possibly matching records. Or, more specifically, possibly matching personas in indexed historical records.

When you click on one, you see the persona from the historical record on the left, along with their one-hop relatives (parents above, spouse just below, children below that, and siblings below that). Anyone who isn't one of those kinds of relatives (as far as the record specifies) is listed as "other" at the bottom.

On the right is the corresponding person from Family Tree, along with their one-hop relatives, all lined up with the corresponding people from the historical record (as far as the matching algorithms and data structure can determine).

When you decide that these really are the same person, click "Attach" and the two corresponding people turn green, indicating that they are linked up. At that point, corresponding relatives now have an "Attach" link between them, indicating that they can be attached, too.

If some of the relatives aren't aligned right, you can drag the record persons up and down to align them with the right person in the tree. This can happen if the match algorithm makes a mistake, or if the data in the record or the tree is a bit off, or, most commonly, if the original record didn't contain relationship information. For example, the 1850-1870 U.S. Census collections don't have a "relationship to head" column, so everyone except for the focus person are all listed down in "Other on Record" until you drag them up where you believe they go.

For each relative, you can click "attach", click to copy any new data from the record into the person, click the blue "Attach" button to confirm, and then both people turn green to indicate that they are linked up.

If a person in the record does not appear in Family Tree, then you can click "add" to create a corresponding person in Family Tree, including relationships to the "main" person being dealt with. (You will then have to click "Attach" to finish attaching the persona in the record to the newly-created person in the tree. That should probably happen automatically, so maybe that will get fixed.).

When everyone in the record is green, you know that all of the people in the record are accounted for in Family Tree. And because you have linked them up, the system knows this, too.

(One gal I was helping with family history was an avid board game player, and her eyes lit up when I told her, "For each person you turn green, you get one victory point!")

First full-blown source-centric feature

It may not be obvious to everyone what a big deal these features are. They represent the first major foray of Family Tree into the world of source-centric genealogy. Now, not only can users know what the sources say about their ancestors, but the system can understand that, too. Because persons in Family Tree are linked to personas in the records, the system knows who is who, and thus what information each historical record contains about each person in the Family Tree. It also knows which personas in the record are not yet linked into the tree, and it often knows how those personas are related to people who are in the tree.

Family history seems to have at least 3 main stages:

1. Living memory. Research your first four generations (up to your great-grandparents) by talking to living people and asking what they remember; looking at personal artifacts lying around your house or the home of a living relative, and so on. You and your living relatives (and the stuff you have in your homes) are the main sources of information.
2. Recent records: direct evidence. Beyond that, you start into the world of recent records often back to around 1800 or so (depending on where you're researching). There are often quite a few records available, including juicy ones like census records that list entire households. These often provide direct evidence of people and their relationships to other people.
3. Old records: indirect evidence. Beyond that, things get murkier. There are fewer records, often with less information, and it is less common to find any single record that lists both people in a relationship. You end up having to make larger leaps of logic ("This was the only Mr. Turner in the area, so he must have been the father of Henry...") based on incomplete records.

These new features take great advantage of the recent records. They help users find sources that mention people they already know about, link them up so the system now understands what those sources say about those people, and then add any new information or relatives to the tree. This is the primary way in which many users will grow the tree and discover new relatives. These features have unlocked solid genealogical research for the masses.

Preserving your old family photos at FamilySearch

FamilySearch.org now allows you to upload photos of your ancestors, tag the faces with their names, type a description of the photo, and then link the tagged faces to individuals in the Family Tree.  This, in turn, makes those tagged faces show up in pedigree charts and elsewhere in the Family Tree, and all of the pictures that someone is tagged in can appear in the "memories" tab of a FamilySearch person page.

The thing that makes me especially happy about this is that there is finally somewhere I can put my family photos where (1) I feel like they will be safe long-term; and (2) others who are interested in them are likely to find them.

Longevity.  The first part is especially important to me.  Storing photos on your hard drive just doesn't cut it, as hard drives crash, and when you die, it is likely your computer will get wiped clean eventually.  Any service that requires a subscription can't work long-term because, again, once you died, you stop paying, and your photos disappear.

I was somewhat interested in 1000memories.com a couple of years ago, and they were claiming to be able to preserve your photos forever.  But how can any company do that? They can't guarantee that they'll be in business 5 years from now, because it takes money to keep the doors open, and the market is fickle.  I e-mailed and was given great assurances of their longevity.

A year later, Ancestry.com bought them, and I got an e-mail saying I had 30 days to start paying or my photos would all be purged.  So much for long-term.

FamilySearch, on the other hand, doesn't depend on subscriptions or profitability to stay in business.  It is sponsored by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which, if you ask them, will be around at least through the "millennium".  And they have so many images scanned from historical documents (over a billion so far) that a few million old family photos shouldn't be a noticeable burden.

They even have people to screen the photos to make sure that only family-friendly photos end up on the site.

So although nothing is fool-proof, this seems like the best solution I have heard so far.  Still, though, keep a copy for yourself, and share one with all your descendants.

Sharing.  The other thing I love about putting old photos on FamilySearch.org is that it is a great place for others to find them.  By linking the face of an ancestor to their entry in the free, collaborative Family Tree, anyone who is related to that person and comes across their entry in the tree will immediately notice that there is at least one photo of them.  By going to the "Memories" tab of the person page, they will see all the rest of them.  So those who are interested in that person will naturally come across all of the photos of them that others have shared.

Similarly, I keep finding more and more of my own relatives that someone else has linked to photos for.  I have been able to see photos that I never would have otherwise have know existed.

Suggestions.  There are a few things I would like to see FamilySearch do to move this further along towards an ideal solution, of course.  These include the following.

• Support standard metadata.  Currently you have to tag faces and enter a title and description in the UI.  But if you have used any other software to enter captions, date, place, and even tag faces, it would be great if FamilySearch would recognize those, and at least give the user the option to use them.
• Similarly, if you download a photo, it would be good if the face tags, title and description would be included in the XMP data for the file, including Metadata Working Group face tagging standards (with an extension to also include Family Tree long-lived URIs for the persons involved).
• If FamilySearch were to lead out in this, perhaps other genealogical software would start taking advantage of these same standards as well.  Then you could tag faces in any number of software packages and take advantage of it in others.
• Simple fixes.  It would be nice to at least support rotate, and perhaps crop, contrast/auto-levels, etc.
• Face identification would let users pick a pre-calculated face box instead of having to draw them by hand, which would help speed it up a little.  Face recognition would be cool, too, but might not be worth the trouble, especially since they don't necessarily encourage having large numbers of photographs for the same person, like you might for more recent digital pictures of living people.

Overall, though, I thought this set of features was really well done.