FamilySearch announces Milestones for retiring New.FamilySearch.org

FamilySearch published a Blog post on 10 November 2014 by Jim Greene entitled, "FamilySearch Announces Milestones for Retirement of new.FamilySearch.org" containing the most concrete information concerning the transition to FamilySearch Family Tree that has been made available. The post states:

The continued effort to enhance and improve FamilySearch Family Tree now requires the decommissioning of the program that Family Tree replaced, new.FamilySearch.org. Accordingly, we are announcing the final milestones for retiring new.FamilySearch.org. 

The next milestone is scheduled for February 1, 2015, when all access to the program will be discontinued (data from new.FamilySearch.org will be accessible at www.FamilySearch.org). All public-facing Application Programming Interfaces (API) will be disabled, as well as access via login by all users of the program. In effect it will not be visible or accessible. However, there are still many tasks that our engineers will continue to work on, such as migrating and synchronizing datasets to Family Tree, as well as verifying and validating all data. Because of the enormity of the task and the desire to not lose any data, we can only give an estimate as to how long it will take to complete these final tasks. We believe it will take a year, possibly more, before we can reach the final milestone.

I am not sure if this post is the light at the end of the tunnel or just an extension of the tunnel. The post goes on to outline the changes that need to occur before the process is finally finished. Here is the summary of what is left to do:

The final milestone, where we completely retire new.FamilySearch.org will, therefore, occur in early 2016. At that point, once we are certain that all data has correctly migrated, we will begin work on very important data enhancements for Family Tree including:

• Merging of gateway ancestors and other famous people (also known as IOUSs)
• Highlighting and fixing other data issues, such as: individuals who are married before they are born, child older than a parent, child who is a spouse of a parent or grandparent, and such.
• Ability for users to edit the gender of an ancestor.
• Ability to see current spouse’s line by default.

Questions can be directed to support@familysearch.org.

As soon as I get a chance to study what this will mean to the users, I will write a follow-up post. My biggest concern is with the first listed task: Merging of gateway ancestors and other famous people (also known as IOUSs). It sounds like this task is going to be done by FamilySearch itself. I am most interested in this process since many of my own ancestors fall in this category. I would assume that there will be a way to reverse some of the merges if they are done incorrectly. Stay tuned.