Update on the end of the FamilySearch.org Catalog

 

https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/results?count=20&placeId=1927135&query=%2Bplace%3AArgentina 

What is missing from this screenshot of the FamilySearch.org Catalog? The answer is the entire Province of Buenos Aires. I realize that I wrote about this previously in this blog post.

https://genealogysstar.blogspot.com/2024/10/the-beginning-of-end-of-familysearch.html 

But now I have more information about what is happening at FamilySearch. However, saying anything about FamilySearch usually includes a healthy dose of speculation. The FamilySearch folks are usually responsive in the FamilySearch Community but there is issue with the Catalog and the Images sections of FamilySearch go way beyond leaving a comment in the Community. 

I recently saw a Facebook post from David E. Rencher, Chief Genealogical Officer at FamilySearch, notifying the genealogy community at large about this issue, quoting from the Facebook post:

FamilySearch product managers have set up automatic creation of Full-Text Search collections based upon the primary life event of the image. Internal genealogists have advised that researchers are better served by record collections organized by record type. Product managers feel differently. https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100067913932788

The issue is illustrated by this chart:

The issue of changing the entries in the old FamilySearch.org Catalog and the Image section as well as developing the Full-Text Search capabilities are the same issue: how do we find valuable genealogical information?

Catalogs, such as the FamilySearch Catalog (Old) mirror the reality of where documents might be found. The Catalog is organized geographically i.e. by the places where documents may be found in the real world. 

Well, what about using "Life Events"? One example will suffice: Coming-of-Age. Not only is the category vague and could include a huge variety of unrelated events, it is not found in any existing cataloging system. To illustrate this, do a Google search for "Arizona coming-of-age" and see the results. 

What you will see is a long list of ceremonies performed by Native Americans in the present and the past. There is no mention of records or record sources. You can get another idea from the Library of Congress Classification Outline. See https://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/lcco/  

You can also get some idea about cataloging systems from the WorldCat.org website. Try searching for Coming-of-Age and see the responses. Do you see any genealogically related books or records? 

My example of searches using "Coming-of-Age" is just the same as changing the jurisdictional categories in the Old FamilySearch Catalog by adding Buenos Aires City and dropping the category for Buenos Aires Province (where the records are actually found). Why are these people at FamilySearch thinking that they can somehow come up with a new system of organization for finding genealogy records when all the world's records are organized by location and topic?

There is a lot more to say on this topic but I have stacks of other pressing matters besides trying to explain to engineers at FamilySearch how to do genealogy. But, of course, I will take the time if they are willing to listen. One example is a review of the "New" FamilySearch Library Catalog. https://www.familysearch.org/en/library/our-catalogs which makes no effort at all on organization and looks a lot like the university catalogs I have been working with for the past 60 years. 

Challenges in adding one tag the FamilySearch Memories almost defeat me

 

I am concerned that the FamilySearch.org website is going through a phase of reorganizing rather than taking advantage of new tools without throwing out the old. 

Recently, I spent about 45 minutes adding two image to the FamilySearch Memories section. I found that the entire procedure for uploading a single memory had changed. The last explanation of the update was a post back on May 11, 2024. https://www.familysearch.org/en/blog/memories-viewer-updates-2024 This short announcement doesn't describe any of the major changes.  Here is a screenshot of one of the two uploads that took so long to do. 

The main issue was tagging a photo. The process of tagging apparently now takes several steps. I didn't think I could yet describe the steps because it is so complicated. When I started writing this post, I noticed that Elias W. Tanner's wife Rebecca P. King was also on his grave marker so I decided to see if I could describe the process. 

Step #1: I clicked on the image with Rebecca's name. Here is what showed up. 

Step #2 I remembered that I needed to have her ID# or name, so I typed in her name. The name wasn't recognized so I had to click on her husband who I already had listed and found her name Rebecca Potter King and ID#. I copied the ID number and pasted in the number. 

Step #3 Remember, I had recently already managed to tag four other people. However, at this step, if I click on the name that says "Add New" the program does not look up the ID# it just adds the ID# as the name for the tag. 

Step #4 At this point I am puzzled. Below the number it says Attach to Tree. Well, Rebecca is already in my part of the Family Tree, but I decide to click and see what happens. Now it asks me to search for the number I just copied from the Family Tree. 

Step #5 I don't seem to remember that it was this complicated just to add one tag. But I click on search the family tree and now I am lost. I am taken to the general search page. 

I already know that Rebecca is in the Family Tree so I change the field to Find by ID and once again put in her ID#.

Step #6 Remember again, that I am trying to tag an image in memories and it shows me her entry in a search field. 

Step #7 So far, I haven't tagged the photo and I am totally lost because I don't know what to do next. I see the normal Select button that takes me to the person in the Family Tree where I started. So, I click the button. Amazingly, this takes me back to the Memories section and there is a tag on Rebecca's name. although the name on the tag is an ID#

Step #8 Now, I can't remember how I got the names on the other tags. I randomly decide to click on the ID#.

Step #8 Remember, I am still just adding one tag to one person and I have spent almost an hour writing this blog post so far. Here is what I am looking at when I randomly click on Rebecca's ID# 

Step #9 I can detach the memory from the Family Tree. This is not what I wanted to do. So, I do what I usually do in these situations, I click on stuff.  I click on the number. Not that there was any particular reason for clicking but I see that the number is blue and that usually indicates a link. 

Step #10 Apparently, I can now edit the ID# tag to a name. So I type in her name. That changes the name to Rebecca Potter King. 

Step #11 Now what? Do I have to do this for every single memory I put on the FamilySearch.org website? There must be a shorter way to do all this. So I look for some instructions on the new changes. Remember, this is me looking for one of my memories. I know how to search since I sit here and do that almost all day, every day. I do not find any instructions. I decide to click in the image. 

I now have one tag on an image with seven potential tags. 

Does anyone out there know of a better system for adding one tag? I do figure out that there is one small shortcut. But I am keeping that to myself until I see the explanation in print from someone who should have stopped trying to reorganize the team. 

RootsTech 2025 Genealogical AI Spotlight on Military Records.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/fV1Rjv93ekc?feature=share

RootsTech 2025 Reel Stories presents your Genealogical Artificial Intelligence Spotlight. This month’s AI spotlight is about the treasure trove in military records. 172 countries have had military forces during the last 100 years and there have been more than 35 wars. Many countries with a miliary kept records about their soldiers. Military Records may be detailed but can be elusive. They are always a valuable source of genealogical and family history information. Artificial intelligence helps make all records, including military records more easily discoverable. The huge video collection on RootsTech.org and the documents and records on FamilySearch.org, with assistance of AI can help you find elusive military records. Sign in for free on both RootsTech.org and FamilySearch.org and begin discovering your military ancestors.

You can register for free at RootsTech.org online and also register for in person at the Salt Palace in Salt Lake City, Utah on March 4th through 6th, 2025. 

 

The Beginning of the End of the FamilySearch Catalog or another Beginning?

 

It is common knowledge among those genealogists that I come in contact with that the FamilySearch.org Catalog has not been updated for over two years. What this means is that the millions of digitized records being added daily to the FamilySearch.org website are not in the Catalog. So where are they? I will leave that question for a while as I try to explain what is going on from the perspective of someone who uses the Catalog and other resources on the FamilySearch.org website many times in a single day. 

https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog

The main use of the Catalog is to find stuff (records, documents, etc.) on the FamilySearch website. It has worked sort-of well since the website was first put online on May 24, 1999. Its main use for serious genealogists is to discover the jurisdictional organization of the various geographic areas of the world. Now, I happen to do an extensive number of online consultations with people from Argentina. See the following link. 

https://www.familysearch.org/en/library/genealogy-help

Now some a short (hopefully) look at the government of Argentina and its jurisdictions. This is important because certain types of records are located in specific governmental jurisdictions. Here is an example of the location of the Argentine Civil Registration Records. 

Los registros del registro civil en Argentina son mantenidos principalmente por el Registro Nacional de las Personas (RENAPER). Este organismo gubernamental es responsable de mantener y administrar registros vitales como actas de nacimiento, actas de matrimonio y actas de defunción.

El RENAPER tiene oficinas regionales en toda Argentina, donde puede solicitar copias de sus registros del registro civil. Puede encontrar la ubicación de la oficina del RENAPER más cercana visitando su sitio web oficial o contactándolos directamente.

Hmm, that explanation seems to be in Spanish. What is says is that Civil Registration records are found in the National Register of Persons in various locations around the country. If you search the FamilySearch.org website for Argentine Civil Registration records, a valuable resource for genealogists, you will find that FamilySearch.org has very, very few of these records. The partial explanation about the existence of these records is explained in the FamilySearch Research Wiki,  

Now what is going on with the Catalog? Yesterday, in the morning I did my regular searches in for records in Buenos Aires Province for a potential consultation. By the afternoon, when I needed more information I found that Buenos Aires Province had been removed from the Catalog. See above. Some at FamilySearch inserted a link to "Buenos Aires City" which is probably a reference to the fact that Buenos Aires is an autonomous city and the capital of Argentina. But the other issue is that the entry for Buenos Aires Province had been removed. Buenos Aires City is divided into 15 Comunas. An Argentine "comuna" is a neighborhood or group of neighborhoods in the city of Buenos Aires. However, Buenos Aires City located in Buenos Aires Province. Here is an explanation of the provinces from a Wikipedia article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provinces_of_Argentina

Argentina is divided into twenty-three federated states called provinces (Spanish: provincias, singular provincia) and one called the autonomous city (ciudad autónoma) of Buenos Aires, which is the federal capital of the republic (Spanish: Capital Federal) as decided by the Argentine Congress.[1] The provinces and the capital have their own constitutions and exist under a federal system.

Here is another quote from an AI search with references to Wikipedia. 

Administrative divisions: Provinces are divided into departments, which are further divided into municipalities. Buenos Aires Province is divided into partidos and localidades. 

There is no real translation of the divisions in Buenos Aires Province. Why is knowing all this necessary? Because any successful genealogical research depends on know where and how to find the records. So now, the FamilySearch Catalog has no entry for Buenos Aires Province. I assume all the records are still there somewhere. 

Now, there is a new FamilySearch.org Catalog. See https://www.familysearch.org/en/library/our-catalogs however, this is what is said on the website.

Either catalog can be searched, however it's best to use the new Library Catalog because it's continually being updated. The existing Catalog on FamilySearch.org was last updated September 2022. 

Let's just say that giving us a list of all the records of Argentina in a list does not help much. Especially, if you do not automatically know the names of all the provinces (see the first image above) and which cities (municipios) are available. Like in the old Catalog. The "New" Catalog looks a lot like a university catalog so that if you click enough you might run across some of the records for a specific location. 

What about the Images? Oh yes, there is another part of the website with digital images of a whole lot of records. These are simply organized by jurisdiction and date. But they are searchable or should I say they were searchable? 

There is an entry for Buenos Aires Province but this is to unindexed and uncataloged records which, for the most part, have to be searched day by day. There is also a mysterious reference in the Images list to Distritos Militar. These seem to be a long list of military draft records with no reference to where the records came from. 

Well, I could go on for a long time but I have other obligations to my time. 

Good Luck at finding anything in the FamilySearch.org record collection if this spreads to other parts of the website besides Argentina. I realize that I haven't gotten into more detail about the Catalog and the Images, but I ran out of time to write. 

 

Please Help The Family History Guide

 thefhguide.com

This was sent out to many of our friends across the world. We are at a crucial stage in our growth and need some help. I realize there are many good ways to donate but this is a way to directly affect genealogy. Here is the text from the email. 

The Family History Guide will soon be exposed to its largest audience ever!  We will be featured on the VIEWPOINT documentary program, hosted by Dennis Quaid, and broadcast nationwide by PBS and other major TV networks. VIEWPOINT will be highlighting Genealogy and Family History and our partnership with The National Genealogical Society.  VIEWPOINT has a viewership of 60 million+.  In addition, we will be both in-person and virtual at the largest genealogical conference in the world, RootsTech 2025.

WE NEED YOUR HELP! We are growing rapidly and so are our financial needs.  We need to raise an additional $25,000 to cover the increasing costs of our outreach program and expenses for broadcast production and RootsTech 2025.

Please consider donating and thereby helping support our mission To greatly increase the number of people actively involved in family history worldwide, and to make everyone's family history journey easier, more efficient, and more enjoyable. Please Remember We have NO PAID staff.  All are volunteers. (Click HERE to see staff) We are a 501c3 charitable non profit We operate ENTIRELY on donations Your donation is usually tax-deductible (See your financial advisor) There are so many ways to support our mission.  Click the DONATE button below to see how YOU can help. Here is where the donate button goes. Remember, The Family History Guide Association, the sponsor of the website, is a qualified 501 (c) 3 corporation and all contributions are tax deductible in the U.S.  Click here to donate My wife and I have been working with The Family History Guide for over ten years and now we are seeing the results of all the work we and mostly others have done to make this a global support for family history and genealogy. We donate time, and some money, but we do need help.  Thanks for your consideration.

The key to adding a generation to your family tree and thoughts on quality ratings

The crucial issue with any individual entry in the Family Tree is if there is a valid historical source (record, document etc.) showing a parent/child relationship. Absence of this important documentation means the person without a continuing source for a parent/child relationship is essentially the end of the line, not a child of the family, or is not a sibling. I certainly understand about beginning genealogists adding information from their composite family memory, but these living and recently dead people are usually easier to document. 

The issue of the absence of a document showing a parent/child relationship is extremely common in lines on the FamilySearch Family Tree that go back into the early 1800s and 1700s. I find this end of line almost 100% of the time when I see one of these lines that wanders back into the Middle Ages. To make this clear, the end of the line on any ancestral line occurs when there is no document showing a parent/child relationship. 

So any quality rating that does not include some way of determining this basic relationship for moving back an additional generation is incomplete and needs further research. Records that could show such a relationship to the next generation include birth records, probate records, land and property records. military records, tax records, census records, and many others. 

In addition, continuing research for additional generations based on one document is also a very bad idea. The main reason is the prevalence of people with the same name. The accuracy of the family tree rises and falls on this one simple issue. 

Here is an example of an ancestral line that begins with this person who has NO sources and continues for generations: Edward Morgan L4Y1-F4P.  The Family Tree shows 17 or 18 or more generations back from this one person without a source record who was married in Shepherdstown, Jefferson, West Virginia, United States up to a hundred years before any of these places existed except Shepherdstown that was established on December 23, 1762.  Jefferson County was established in 1801 in Virginia. West Virginia did not exist until June 20, 1863. This is just the tip of this messy ancestral line. The last person in this line without a further generational parent/child relationship is Garrad Morgan L7GZ-YBB who was born in 1755. He is the "real" end of the line that stretches back more than twenty generations. It doesn't really matter too much at all that the Quality Score for L7GZ-YBB is Medium and his non-existent father GM8Y-L9D is also Medium and does not exist.  I do think the ratings are helpful, but do not yet assess the accuracy of the entries. 

Some common steps to online security

 

Security is one of the major concerns of the day. You can regularly read about huge websites and databases being hacked and the information stored compromised. Security on your computer or your smartphone should be as automatic as locking your door at night (or during the day depending on where you live) and routinely locking your car unless you live in San Francisco and leave it unlocked and empty to avoid a broken window. Even genealogists need to be aware of the security of our data. 

The first and most common issue is logins and passwords. Basic security mandates logins and passwords that have enough characters (letters, numbers, and other symbols) to be harder to sign in (weak vs. strong). In addition, each password should be unique. It is not a good idea to reuse a password. Most of us have a place we keep our passwords. That place should be secure and subject to password protection also. If you have them on a piece of paper, make sure the location of the list is secure. 

One way to create a strong password is to use a combination of words, numbers and symbols. For example: this is a strong password "ElephantMachineDoctor34!!" assuming it does not exceed the number of characters mandated by the website or program you are entering. Random letter, number, and symbol passwords are extremely hard to remember and difficult to type correctly. Although the password generated by the websites or programs are strong, they are also random and arbitrary. 

The next level of security concern is when you are using a computer in a library, FamilySearch Center, or some other publicly accessible place. Depending on the facility where the computer is located, unless you log out of any programs you use, the computer may remember the login and password and allow any random person who uses the computer have access after you leave. For example here in the BYU Library Family History Center, if you login to websites and programs, some of the websites and programs will keep you logged in even if you log out of the main BYU access program. In the case of the university, all the computers are supposed to be wiped clean every night but we still find absent people signed in on a regular basis. 

Email addresses are not intended to be secure. One obvious reason is that your email address will likely be used as your login although sometimes the website will send you an email to verify that it is your email address. It is a good idea to have one email address for day-to-day use and another used for signing into secure websites. You can have several different email logins but using more than one or two for routine email become complicated. The multiple emails can cause problems when they are used as the login for a website and then forgotten. You may have to log into the website and the website will send a key for logging in to your old email address and if this happens to be the one you have forgotten or closed, you may go through a complex issue with the website before being admitted.

If you forgotten your login or password, most websites and programs have a way to restore the password or have create a new one. Always remember to immediately write down the new password. If you are like me, I would forget what I used almost as soon as I was through logging in. 

An unrelated issue is maintaining the security of your computer, smartphone, or other device. Pinning your passwords on a stick it note is not a good idea unless you take another step and encode all your pass words. Your code could be quite simple: 3456Missippi23!!! could be shown on your password list as 34M2!!! and you could then have created a system that only you know about that lets you know that 34 is 3456, M is Mississippi, and 2!!! is really 23!!!.

There are many more security concerns. Phishing is one issue that is becoming endemic. Phishing involves send a legitimate looking email requesting some personal information. Phishing is not limited to email,  it is also becoming common with text messages and phone calls. If you get an unfamiliar email, text, or phone call make sure that you do not open the email or text and do not answer the phone call even to tell the person on the line to hang up. You should have a working voice mail if you are concerned about having phone calls from a sizable group of people. Let the phone call go to voice mail and if it turns out to be a legitimate phone call, text or email, you can either call the person back or contact them in some other way. Legitimate contacts will leave a voice mail or call you more directly so you know who is calling. 

Genealogical information is usually not private and since it found in available historical records, the information is not something that people who are trying to gather personal information to sell or use for criminal purposes. One exception is the common banking "secure" question that is the maiden name of your grandmother or some other relative. People like me have multiple family trees on various websites and almost all my family trees are open to the public and contain the maiden name of my grandmother (or some other person). Apparently banks do not know about online family trees.

Another issue happens when a website you are using is hacked. You might get a notice to change your login and/or password. Do it the minute the procedure is available. On the other hand, if you are not really using the website it is a good idea to sign out, if you can, and take the program off your computer or stop using the website. But don't use the old password.

This subject could go on for volumes with examples of dangerous behaviors. But the basic idea here is to be aware of the need for security and learn about the ways your security can be increased.