Genealogy in 2023: Are you up to speed?

 

I have always been an avid reader of science fiction. As the years pass, I realize that I am now living in the future as envisioned by many of the books I read beginning sixty years ago. Guess what? The present that was the future in the 1950s and 1960s is essentially not at all like the one in the books. I could go on and on about those things some authors predicted and failed and the others that guessed the changes that happened, but one thing missing from all books and movies is the impact of digitization of genealogical records. The closest guess comes from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. The internet is the closest thing we have today that matched the capabilities of the Hitchhiker's Guide.

Now, what do we do with all this information? I still see genealogists carrying around a huge burden of paper and writing down everything with paper and pencil. This means that they are going to do everything at least twice or that some relative will end up redoing all the research and work. I have to admit that I have more electronic tools for gathering information than I have time to use. I also have to admit that I sometimes write a note on a pile of scratch paper I have next to my keyboard, but that is because I have a better chance of remembering the note it is staring me in the face than when it is sitting on a list on my computer. 

The reality of genealogical research today is that both Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Handwriting Recognition have reached the level that millions of genealogically valuable documents are being indexed and, in some cases, transcribed every day. For example, MyHeritage.com added 2.5 billion historical records in 2023. See https://blog.myheritage.com/2023/01/wrapping-up-2022-year-in-review/ MyHeritage now has 18.9 billion records. 

Here is a statement from FamilySearch about the records added in 2022. See https://www.familysearch.org/en/blog/2022-familysearch-year-in-review 

FamilySearch added nearly 2 billion searchable names and images in 2022 from ancestral homelands worldwide for a total of 16.3 billion free historical records and images! Significant expansions in 2022 included records for Scandinavian countries (Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland), the Netherlands, Spain, the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, Mexico, Uruguay, Venezuela, Peru, areas in the Caribbean and Pacific Islands, and more.

FamilySearch also added 19,264 digital books to its Books collection. Ancestry now has over 30 billion records. See https://www.ancestry.com/c/product/releases

Of course, all three companies count their records differently but assuming you wanted to look at just these three companies' records, If you looked at one record every second it would take you about 2,132 years to look at all the records and that is only three companies.

As genealogists, we really can't ignore the numbers. This means that the old paper way of doing genealogy has to evolve into the digital version. Can we keep up? To do genealogy today, you need some serious computer skills. Fortunately, technology does not stand still. We now have the possibility through Artificial Intelligence that we can use the AI tools to look for us with increased accuracy. 

Perhaps you should be concerned about being left behind. But I do have one suggestion, the genealogists who are becoming interested in actually doing genealogical research today will definitely need superior computer skills. Maybe instead of just helping our children to become interested in family history, we should also be helping them develop the computer skills necessary to survive in the future.