The Family History Guide now in FamilySearch.org Help Center

 

https://www.familysearch.org/en/fieldops/article/family-tree-basics 

Several years ago, my wife and I began working at the Brigham Young University (BYU) Family History Library. We also began working with The Family History Guide Website. 

thefhguide.com

We recognized that The Family History Guide was a valuable resource for teaching the missionary volunteers in the library. Now, for at least the last seven or eight years, the BYU Family History Library has been using The Family History Guide to teach the missionary staff that serve in the library as Church Service Missionaries for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Eventually, The Family History Guide was accepted for teaching the Church Service Missionaries serving in the Utah Salt Lake City Headquarters Mission. Now, the lessons used to teach the missionaries about the FamilySearch.org Family Tree are available on the FamilySearch.org website for the benefit of any user. 

You can navigate to the Family Tree Basics page with the links to The Family History Guide by first, clicking on the question mark icon in the upper right-hand corner of the homepage. 

You then click on the link for "Help and Learning."

When you arrive at the Help and Learning page and scroll down to the Learning Center link that says, "Build Skills, Make Progress."

You are now in the Learning Center and can then click on the link for Family Tree Basics. 

Another click will take you to list of lessons shown above at the beginning of this post. 

To get there directly, you can click on this link.

https://www.familysearch.org/en/fieldops/article/family-tree-basics

Each lesson begins with a Learning Road Map and then the lessons are from The Family History Guide. 

All of us at The Family History Guide Association are grateful for this opportunity to reach a wider audience for learning about the FamilySearch.org Family Tree. If you need help or have any questions, please feel free to contact me or my wife at the BYU Family History Library. 

You can also get help from the BYU Family History Library by clicking on the link to the Virtual Family History Help Desk. Here is an explanation about how that works. 

This is James Tanner. My wife, Ann, and I can meet with you on the BYU Family History Library Virtual Help Desk during the time the Help Desk is available. Here is the link to the BYU Family History Library, https://fh.lib.byu.edu/ I have attached a screenshot of the web page for reference. When you click on the link button, you will see the second page. https://fh.lib.byu.edu/live-virtual-missionary-help/ See also the screenshot attached. When you click on this link you will be connected to a Zoom meeting online at the library. You can ask for help from the missionaries, or we can schedule to meet. If we set a time to meet, I will be there waiting for you online and we will go to a breakout room and talk and share screens.  

https://fh.lib.byu.edu/

https://fh.lib.byu.edu/live-virtual-missionary-help/ 

Goldie May now on FamilySearch Portal and free in FamilySearch Centers

 

One of the most innovative and useful programs that have been developed in the past few years, GoldieMay.com is now included in the FamilySearch Portal and is therefore free to use in all FamilySearch Centers. 

If you need a quick review about the program, here is a video from YouTube.com

https://youtu.be/AifF35ffER8

Reimagine, An Innovative Photo Mobile App by MyHeritage

 For a full explanation of this remarkable app, see the MyHeritage Blog, "Introducing Reimagine: An Innovative Photo App by MyHeritage." Here is a video that explains the app. 

https://youtu.be/zawU9mI_lEc

I have it on my iPhone and started with taking a photo of a page of images in a photo scrapbook. It easily separated the photos into individual images and saved each image to my Apple Photos app. I also saved a copy to my photos on MyHeritage.com. Very slick and easy to use. Down near the end of the long article it does say the following:

Anyone can scan a limited number of album pages for free, to experience the power of the photo scanner. Improving a limited number of photos using the photo features is also free. Beyond that, scanning and improving an unlimited number of photos requires a subscription.

A yearly Reimagine subscription costs only $49.99 (or equivalent in local currency) and begins with a 7-day free trial, so users can experience the app before they commit. A monthly subscription costs $7.99/month and does not come with a free trial. Both plans include unlimited use of all Reimagine features.

Users with a MyHeritage Complete plan can colorize, enhance, animate, and repair unlimited photos on Reimagine, and enjoy unlimited photo storage. Scanning full album pages is a new feature that is unique to the Reimagine app, so to scan an unlimited number of photos, a subscription to Reimagine is required even for Complete subscribers. For an introductory period, we’re offering Complete subscribers a discount of 25% off the Reimagine annual plan.

If you have a number of photo albums or scrapbooks, like I have, this app can pay for itself in time saved. coupled with the online MyHeritage website expanded tagging feature, the app could pay for itself in saved time. 

Billions and Billions

 

Actually, Carl Sagan never said "billion and billions." See Wikipedia: Billions and Billions. But the number of online, digitized records is now literally in the billions and billions. Ancestry.com is claiming that they will add an additional 15 billion records to their website in 2023 after claiming to have added 5.2 billion in 2022. See https://youtu.be/MYY8tKM_zfA.  For some time, Ancestry.com has been claiming to have 30 billion records on their website. MyHeritage adds billions of new records every year and currently says that they have over 19 billion records. FamilySearch.org claims to have over 13 billion records. Findmypast.com probably has billions more and the list can go on and on. I guess I need to note that the estimates of the number of people who ever lived is about 100.8 to 121 billion. See https://www.timesnownews.com/web-stories/world/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-on-earth/photostory/95430679.cms

The number of people on the earth today is also an estimate of about 8 billion. See https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/ So, the number of online records in just this small group of genealogy websites is much greater than the number of people presently on the earth. Unfortunately, even with the overage of records most of the world's current population probably doesn't show up in any of the websites. One main reason being the lack of information about living people. 

In case you are thinking that the number of digitized records in the major genealogy websites has somehow made a dent in the existing records, you should also know that the overall global datasphere has exceeded 64 zettabytes. A zettabyte is 1000 exabytes and an exabyte is 1000 petabytes that is 1000 terabytes that is 1000 gigabytes. We are literally drowning in information. 

Despite the billions of records on the major genealogy websites, it is still highly likely that you will be unable to find at least some of the records that theoretically could exist about your own ancestors. But one thing the numbers do point out is that you should be aware of the content of all the major genealogy websites and not astigmatically focus on only one.  That said, it is important to realize that for the foreseeable future, there will always be more paper records locked up in archives and libraries than are available online. 

FamilySearch Investigates Facial Recognition

 Well, we are interested but don't have a lot more information other than our interest. Facial recognition is not a particularly new technology but tagging historical photos is more complicated than identifying possible relationships from. similar facial features. One genealogy program with facial recognition has a moderately low rate of accuracy. Yes, the concept is helpful but if you tell me I have a cousin that isn't much help, I have thousands, actually tens of thousands of cousins. Tagging photos is the first stage in identifying individuals in old photos. Unfortunately, I have thousands of old photos for which I have no identification. Here is an example. 

I know that this photo was likely taken by my Great-grandmother, Margaret Godfrey Jarvis Overson. I can tell approximately when the photo was taken but that is about all I can identify. Even if I knew that I was related to these people, it would not be much help. I am related to a large percentage of all the people that lived in Apache County, Arizona from pioneer times. There is also a possibility that this particular photo, which is a copy of an earlier photo, was taken by Margaret's father, Charles Godfrey DeFriez Jarvis because with the animal hide and the backdrop, this may be from a photo taken as early as the 1880s. It may also be possible that my great-grandmother was just copying the photo from someone else because she was a professional photographer and the photo was taken somewhere else and the people in the photo are not even remotely related to me. Hmm. Photo ID seems to be complicated. 

Is ChatGPT worth using? Especially for genealogy and genealogy related uses?

 

The answers to the questions in the title of this post are both NO. So far, I have tried a number of different types of questions or suggestions to ChatGPT and the results have been helpful only if I just need some ideas and words. I find any reference to dates, places, or specific facts to be almost uniformly wrong. It may work for planning a trip, but I wouldn't rely on any specific facts about dates, times, or even addresses. It appears to me to be only a way to gather suggested topics. If you want facts, use Wikipedia which at least has some source references. If you want to see my analysis of a ChatGPT response on a post for Walking Arizona, see https://walkingarizona.blogspot.com/2023/04/paris-france-temple-of-church-of-jesus.html

United States Social Security NUMIDENT records added to FamilySearch.org

 

This is one of the collections of 63,700,494 records on the FamilySearch.org website that has only been available for a relatively short time. Here is the description of the files from the FamilySearch.org entry shown above. 

The Social Security Administration created these records to track the earnings of US workers and determine benefit entitlements. The publishable index only contains information for deceased individuals and was gathered from all three record types in the collection: applications, deaths, and claims. Each compiled record includes fields for the name of the deceased, social security number, parents' names, gender, birth city and state or country, birth date, and death date.

Here is an example of the content of a record for one of my relatives. 

Several of my searches for other relatives did not find any records and I am guessing that they either died too recently or did not have a social security account. You can see from this record that Donnette did not apply for Social Security coverage until she was about 73 years old. 

There is a more detailed description of the record set in the FamilySearch Research Wiki. 

https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/United_States,_Social_Security_Numerical_Identification_Files_(NUMIDENT)_-_FamilySearch_Historical_Records

I will be highlighting other useful collections from time to time.