GoFundMe fundraiser for The Family History Guide

 

GoFundMe for The Family History Guide

Here is the information about The Family History Guide from the GoFundMe website. 

The Family History Guide is a free website that represents a best-in-class learning environment for family history. Its scope is broad, but its focus is narrow enough to help you achieve your goals, step by step. Whether you're brand new to family history or a seasoned researcher—or somewhere in between—The Family History Guide can be your difference maker.

Mission Statement: "Our mission is 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."

Here are some of the unique features you'll find on the site:

Goals for learning, supported by flexible choices

Step-by-step instructions to make learning easier

Links to videos and articles from FamilySearch, Ancestry, and more

QUIKLinks that take you to record searches from multiple sources, with a single click

Project Tracker sheets and training materials for self-study or group instruction

Activities for families, individuals, youth, and kids

Family history resources for faiths, including members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Catholics, Protestants, and those of Jewish heritage.

ALL Donated funds are used for our outreach programs including RootsTech, Guided Learning, ZOOM presentations and other activities. We have users in over 150 countries as well as a partnership with The National Genealogical Society (NGS). The Family History Guide was featured on the PBS program VIEWPOINT with Dennis Quaid with an audience of over 60 million.

Are administrative costs are minimal in that we have NO PAID STAFF and 100% run by volunteers.

View https://www.thefhguide.com/introduction.html for more information

Be on the lookout! RootsTech 2026 is coming.

 

https://www.familysearch.org/en/rootstech/

RootsTech.org is coming from March 5-7, 2026 both online and in person and registration opens on September 24, 2025. The conference will be at the Salt Palace in downtown Salt Lake City, Utah. If you are coming to Salt Lake City in person, you might need to know that the Plaza Hotel on South Temple in Salt Lake City is scheduled for demolition following closure on November 1, 2025. This will impact the number of hotel rooms available near the Salt Palace. There is also other construction going on in the downtown area and you may want to get a hotel reservation early.

As usual, I will be volunteering as a RootsTech Media representative and I will also be at the booth for The Family History Guide. 

Thoughts on online and in-person consultations

For the past ten years or so, I have been consulting online with a variety of people around the world. Presently, as a Church Service Missionary, I serve at the BYU Library Family History Center where we have a Virtual Help Desk. 

https://familyhistory.lib.byu.edu/get-help

Over the years, I have volunteered to help with a variety of genealogical topics, but because I speak Spanish fluently, many of my consultations both online and in person are Spanish speaking and mostly are immigration questions and most come from Latin America. This has been true for the past twenty years especially when I was living in Arizona. 

One thing I have learned is there is an overwhelming interest in obtaining dual-citizenship for either Spain or Italy. The main challenge being a lack of knowledge of the place of origin of the immigrant. I have developed a “standard” response even though the response is not very promising. The answer for all immigrant questions is that research for an immigrant begins in the country of arrival, not the country of departure. 

The second issue that has become clear is that those coming online from Latin America are usually more computer and smartphone literate than those people coming on from the United States. Another lesson, was that a very high percentage of all the requests came from people using a smartphone as their main contact device. 

Another very interesting and challenging issue was that I learned that many (most) of the Latin American records on the FamilySearch.org website are restricted to viewing in a FamilySearch Center. This was true mainly in South America. I have also learned that Spanish language records, depending on the country, can be hard to find online and I end up telling people to contact the Catholic church directly or also, to directly contact civil registration offices. 

I also experienced a basic fact that all the people who were interested enough to come online were very friendly and thankful for the help. I have had hundreds, (perhaps thousands) of special experiences talking to people all over the world. It is probably a good idea to note here that Spanish is the second most spoken language in the world after Chinese. 

My next learning experience has been how limited the genealogically valuable records are in almost all the Spanish speaking countries of the world. There are only two main categories of records: church records and civil registration records. It was also interesting to learn that FamilySearch.org has almost no civil registration records from Argentina. 

The majority of people needing help ultimately come from Latin America with a few from Spain and Italy. I should probably note that I do not speak Portuguese so I haven't helped much with inquiries about Brazil or Portugal. 

I guess another interesting observation is that the lack of awareness of record sources for genealogical research is about the same no matter the language spoken although English speaking patrons are more likely to have a developed a family tree online. 

I have also learned a lot about genealogical records in every Latin American country as well as in Spain and Italy. 

AI turned out to be extremely helpful in identifying Catholic parishes and diocese.

The experience of one-on-one consultations has been priceless.  

A new rule of genealogy for 2025

 

It has been quite a while since I discovered a new Rule of Genealogy. Here are the previous Rules. 

Rule One: When the baby was born, the mother was there.

Rule Two: Absence of an obituary or death record does not mean the person is still alive.

Rule Three: Every person who ever lived has a unique birth order and a unique set of biological parents.

Rule Four: There are always more records.

Rule Five: You cannot get blood out of a turnip.

Rule Six: Records move.

Rule Seven: Water and genealogical information flow downhill.

Rule Eight: Everything in genealogy is connected (butterfly).

Rule Nine: There are patterns everywhere.

Rule Ten: Read the fine print.

Rule Eleven: Even a perfect fit can be wrong.

Rule Twelve: The end is always there.

Rule Thirteen: Genealogists abhor a blank field.

Rule Fourteen: You are not responsible for what you find.

Rule Fifteen: A fact is not a fact unless you have a record to prove it. 

I was beginning to think that there were no more rules. I guess I was wrong. Here is another rule. 

Rule Sixteen: Gravity always wins 

This rule is fairly simple. Famous people or those who have genealogically active family members generate most, if not all, the attention and thereby have their lives more completely documented. Just like gravity, they are bigger objects and therefore always attract the most activity. For example, take George Washington, the first president of the United States.  it's estimated that thousands of books have been written about George Washington, with some sources citing figures over 10,000 over the past 200 years and a 2019 estimate of around 900 books specifically for scholarly works. See Washington's Legacy. 

Some people garner a huge amount of interest simply because they have huge families. My sixth great-grandfather, because of the size of his immediate family has tens of thousands of descendants and because I live in Utah, I am frequently asked if I am a relative and I usually am. Another constant reminder of this rule is the constant changes on the FamilySearch.org Family Tree to the Mayflower passengers. 

Perhaps it is partially because of this constant gravitational pull, that I spend most of my time researching my grandmother's lines and those of ordinary people. What is the real benefit of add one more source or document to a person who is already fully documented unless you intend to write a book about the person or have some other research goal? You can easily tell if a person has a high level of gravity by looking at the All Changes of a person such as Francis Cooke LZ2F-MM7 who changes almost daily. 

Let's try to defy gravity. 

Full Text Search moves to FamilySearch Search Menu

 

For the past year or so, Full Text search has been part of the FamilySearch/Labs.org programs. Beginning August 28, 2025, a link to the Full Text search was also available from the standard Search pull down menu in the FamilySearch.org website. This is a significant event and may indicate that the number of documents processed by handwriting recognition has reached some sort of threshold. When you click on the Labs link to the Full Text Search, you get the following screen which shows the integration of the link in the Search menu.

Unfortunately, there does not yet seem to be an indication of how much of the entire FamilySearch record collections has been processed by the Full Text search option. There is a link to Browse All Collections, but the number of processed collections changes from day to day going both up and down. Processed collections are marked in the Catalog. 

So there is a way to see if any specific collection can be full text searched. This is a major step in making the entire collection available to full text search. 

More coming as the full text search continues to develop. By the way, if you don't see this a major genealogical event, you are probably not using the other existing tools available either. 

Guiding Principles for Responsible AI in Genealogy: Accuracy

 

Accuracy

AI can generate false, biased, or incorrect content. Therefore, members of the genealogical community verify the accuracy of the information with other records and acknowledge credible sources of content generated by AI.

This is one of the guiding principles for the responsible use of AII for genealogy developed by the Coalition. See CRAIGEN.org

Initially, AI chatbots were "rule-based" and used a set of predefined rules and keywords. If a user's input didn't match a specific rule, the chatbot couldn't provide a relevant response, leading to frustrating and limited interactions. An example of a rule-based chatbot is a telephone tree answering service. See the following:

Wills, Jason. “The Evolution of AI Chatbots in the Last Decade.” Medium, October 8, 2024. https://jason-wills343.medium.com/the-evolution-of-ai-chatbots-in-the-last-decade-012cf8b126f3.

“The Evolution of NLP Chatbots and Generative AI: How They Work, Why They Matter, and What’s Next.” Accessed August 7, 2025. https://quickchat.ai/post/nlp-chatbot-generative-ai-evolution.

AI chatbots became more useful as natural language processing (NLP) advanced. NLP is a field of AI that helps machines understand, interpret, and generate human language. However, initially, chatbots were limited by the following factors that lead to hallucinations. Here is a list of sources that discuss the issue of hallucination. 

Choi, Anna, and Katelyn Xiaoying Mei. “What Are AI Hallucinations? Why AIs Sometimes Make Things Up.” The Conversation, March 21, 2025. http://theconversation.com/what-are-ai-hallucinations-why-ais-sometimes-make-things-up-242896.

Timothy, Maxwell. “What Is AI Hallucination? How to Fix It.” Accessed August 7, 2025. https://www.chatbase.co/blog/ai-hallucination.

“What Are AI Hallucinations? | IBM.” September 1, 2023. https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/ai-hallucinations.

Wikipedia. “Hallucination (artificial intelligence).” July 29, 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hallucination_(artificial_intelligence)&oldid=1303244625.

Currently, some chatbots are source centric and provide links to websites that are used to construct the answers to prompts (questions). Although it is still necessary to examine the information from the sources, the accuracy of chatbots such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and CoPilot, have evolved to the point of being more reliable. 

The accuracy principle cited above will continue to be a factor in using chatbots for genealogical purposes and will also require the genealogical researcher to continue to take responsibility for the accuracy of the information supplied. 

By actively searching for information and cross-referencing it from multiple sources, deep research models significantly reduce the likelihood of "hallucinating" or making up facts. They are designed to find information to support their claims, and if they can't, they are less likely to generate a false statement with high confidence.

The key, as set forth above, is not to rely on AI as you would a historical source. From my perspective, I use AI as I would an entry in an online family tree or a surname book with no sources, unless the sources are supplied by the AI Chatbot. 

“Ethics and Standards - Board for Certification of Genealogists.” Accessed August 20, 2025. https://bcgcertification.org/ethics-standards.

 

Don't get left behind by AI

 

Artificial intelligence is not a passing fad. It is a fundamental change affect nearly every aspect of our lives. Genealogy does not escape the effects of these major changes. One obvious effect of AI to FamilySearch.org is the end of volunteer-based indexing. If you haven't noticed, Indexing has disappeared from the website. 

All the indexing of records on the FamilySearch.org website is being done by AI-driven Full-Text Search based, in part, on AI based handwriting recognition. 

FamilySearch.org/labs

I suggest the following to get some idea about what is going on. 

• CRAIGEN.org The website of the Coalition for Responsible Use of AI in Genealogy. 
• https://youtu.be/Hfwxe7llx7Q?si=EMEV7WzXMaKxulu6  Updated-AI, Handwriting Recognition and Full-Text Research on FamilySearch

I have a number of other videos on the BYU Library Family History Center YouTube Channel,  but they are now months old and possibly already far out of date. This is the same problem with looking online for current information about AI. You have to look at the date of the article or video and try to find something that is not already out of date. 

AI is currently reaching the saturation point of online text and videos. By the way, I have more videos about AI coming up during the months ahead.