Imminent Makeover of FamilySearch Family Tree
For
some time now, we have heard that the “new Traditional” view of the Family Tree
will be available, imminently.
This week I read Matt Wright FamilySearch blog which said; “if you’ve
logged into Family Tree lately and thought “Wow, that look different,” you’re
right” The traditional Pedigree view on FamilySearch has received a major
upgrade that adds a new look and easier access to key information.” I quickly logged into FamilySearch to
look at my Family Tree…and nothing had changed, same old look. I was
disappointed until I read the last paragraph of the blog which said; “This
updated look is being slowly rolled out at random to some members of the
FamilySearch community. Right now
only about 5% of users can see the changes. Don’t fear if you have not seen these changes yet on your
own Family Tree. They are coming!
Wondering
are these changes? Matt Wright summarizes the changes by saying, “in a
nutshell, we’ve expanded the amount of information displayed for each ancestor
in Family Tree, and we’ve added new ways to decide how you want to view that
information.”
View Changes: There are several visual
enhancements to the traditional pedigree view of Family Tree.
·
Portraits- The preferred portrait for each person is displayed on the
couple card
·
Marriage Date- The earliest marriage date also appears on the couple
card.
·
Research Indicators- Colorful icons appear in the couple card to the
right of each individual and also to the right of marriage information. These icons indicate what steps you can
take to discover more about that person or relationship. (Request Ordinances,
Record Hints, Research Suggestions & Data Problems)
·
Invert Colors- You can choose between a light gray and dark gray color
scheme. You can switch by going to the “Show menu and selecting Invert Colors (Dark
Gray or Light Gray are the options)
I like the dark background, how about you?
Navigation Changes: In addition to the new display items in the Landscape
Pedigree View, some functional changes make it easier to use the Tree and even
enhance the experience on a touch pad device (such as a tablet)
·
Simplified View
switcher-instead of a drop- down menu to switch between the different Family
Tree views, we’ve added a row of icons that appears below the main tree
navigation.
Simplified View
switcher-instead of a drop- down menu to switch between the different Family
Tree views, we’ve added a row of icons that appears below the main tree
navigation.
·
Show or Hide Panel-Clicking “Show” at the top right expands a drop-down
menu with options for showing or hiding informational icons. (Show: Request
Ordinances, Record Hints, Research Suggestions, Data Problems, & Portraits)
·
Scrolling- You can now use a mouse scroll wheel to move the view and see
different parts of the tree. You can still click on the surrounding area around
the tree and drag to change your view.
·
No Hover Actions- The controls available on each couple box are always
displayed, meaning that you no longer need to hover to see children or
additional spouses.
It’s imminent! Cathy
Anderegg commented: “what will make it look vastly different is if you choose
to have a dark background behind the traditional pedigree, rather than the
light one we are used to. And of
course the portraits and indicators on each couple box will be a great addition.”
(Rejoice and be exceedingly Glad, Friday, 6 March 2015)
More FamilySearch News:
As
of last Sunday, March 1- FamilySearch has stricter browser support and will no
longer support the following Browser with:
·
Internet Explorer 9
·
Internet Explorer 10
·
Safari for windows
·
Chrome 18
You
will see the incompatible banner on older versions of Chrome and Firefox.
Suggestion, always use Google Chrome.
Now Available:
1.
You will now be able to dismiss some of the research suggestions
and data problems, which after examination are not valid and should be dismissed.
Users will now have the ability to dismiss such items, but there are some items
that cannot be dismissed and can only be corrected by attaching a source or
correcting a date or removing a relationship, etc. Eventually there be a page
that shows all the dismissed suggestions, which will be similar to merge-not-a-match
and record hint not-a-match which will allow the patron to.
Coming Soon: Additional Not a Match option for hints. From the hint card that appears when you
click from the person page there will be a Not A Match option. This should
allow you to dismiss the hint even if it’s already attached to another records
with a similar name.
A Date to Remember: This is for all the “Night Owls,” on Monday, March 16 around
midnight for 4 hours- Network updates will take place on FamilySearch.
FamilySearch believes all products will be affected and not available to
users. (FS website, indexing, mobile apps, etc.)
A Partnership Town Hall with
FamilySearch Executives:
At
RootsTech three executives with FamilySearch answered questions about
partnerships. The Ancestry Insider
was there and jotted down some of the questions and the executives
responses: Those taking part: Don
Anderson, partner and patron services divisions, Rod DeGiulio, records division
and Craig Miller, product management and engineering divisions. I am including
only a portion of the blog: (The Ancestry Insider, 4 March 2015)
·
Q: Are there any plans for those who have forgotten where we’ve search?
Craig: That’s a ways out. Our priority list is:
1.
Plumbing
2.
Make hints more real-time. Pretty much when you put people in (FT)
you’ll see hints updated
Don: Attach your sources,
you’ll have a sense of where you have been.
·
Q: In my Ancestry.com tree and in FamilySearch Family Tree I have
different records attached. Is there a way to synchronize them?
Don: For Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints, there is a synchronize sources. It is not quite done but
will be done in the next month or two. For general public, it is not available
right now.
·
Q: What’s an upcoming feature you’re most excited about?
Rod: First of all, this year, sometime, we’ll have
our new indexing platform. It will enable more flexibility for choosing
projects, or even a county within a project. And more and more partnering allowing access of their
records on our site, which will enable hinting.
Don: The most exciting to me is the new companies
with apps. I think we’ll see the most growth in the app gallery. I’m
particularly excited about family.me.
Lastly, I’m very excited that within the next six months we’ll have a
synch with Findmypast, and MyHeritage trees.
Craig: My most exciting feature is what Don just
mentioned, having all the tree coming to a common base. It’s staggering in vision. That’s mind
blowing. Second is real-time hinting. Another is a novelty coming sometime
during the year. It’s the notion of how we’re related. There’s a number of
privacy concerns that need to be worked out.
·
Q: In new.FamilySearch, we had the ability to uncombined. Is that going
to be added back in? (Hello where has this person been, new.FamilySearch is
gone!)
Craig: The ability to unmerge currently exists. We’ll enhance it to take
care of the IOUSes. That will be in about a year and a half.
·
Q: Is there a plan to require people who sign up to provide contact
information?
Craig: We use the Church’s system of
authentication. The Church’s membership system does not require an e-mail
address because many Church members access the world don’t have access to
computers. That’s one of the hundreds of reasons why. If you’re not a member of the Church, you have to have an
email. Later on this year we’ll have a system of internal message and talk to
them. Whether they get back to you is their choice. We hope that will open the
doors of communication.
·
Q: On living people in Family Tree, changes are made that were
attributed to FamilySearch, and odd changes to names are being made…
Craig: A lot of our information about living persons comes from the
Church Membership Department.
Occasionally they make a change that pulls the person from Family Tree,
and then puts it back.
(Occasionally this causes the problem you are seeing.) We’re having a
terrible time figuring out this plumbing problem between the Tree and the
Membership Department.
·
Sometimes you can’t combine people because of a membership record…
Craig: The most common reasons (you can’t combine
is because the merge would create and IOUS and) because in the membership
system there are two membership records.
·
The portion of the tree I see has a lot of blocked records. What is the long term plan?
Don: Records are locked for a number of reasons:
IOUS, famous individuals, early church leaders, and those before 1500s. There are processes of getting changes
by involving support.
·
How are we doing getting the rights to records that custodian won’t give
us access to?
Rod: It’s a largely a matter of prioritization. We’ve been gathering records since
1894. We are adding about 450
million images a year. We’re
anticipating being able to double that, It will take a few decades before we
get to all the records that members need. We signed 345 contracts last year for
an additional nearly 1 billion records.
The rate is accelerating.
Craig is fond of saying that on June 17, 2014 the world changed. (That’s
when FamilySearch released hinting.) I believe because of improvements to the
Tree, getting records online will eventually become a bottleneck.
Don: We added about 500 million additional hints a couple weeks
ago. Currently they are about 98%
accuracy. On top of that we’re continuing to improve that accuracy by getting
better and better cross referencing algorithms. As well as that, we’re getting new records. I hope it’s improving your research;
it’s helping mine.
Craig: When we added the ½ billion hints, it added 10 million hints to
people in the tree who had never had hints before. Go back and look in your tree, if you haven’t in the last
couple of weeks. As we analyze the
attached hints, we have found that one out of every ten hints extends the
line!
Craig: So please index!!
Did you Know? That
Saturdays and Sundays from 9 am to 9 pm
FamilySearch has its heaviest usage by far, probably by double, followed
by evenings. Hopefully in about a year and a half you won’t even be thinking
about this. (This confirmed what I already knew, how about you?)
Plans for Sunday??
This
weekend subscription website, “Findmypast.com is giving free access to the
site’s record collections, which includes such collections as:
·
US censuses from 1790 forward
·
Military records including the American Revolution
·
Historical newspapers from across the United States and British papers
as far back as 1710.
·
And more…
The
weekend free period ends, Monday, March 9th at 7 am. You will need
to setup a free registration with the site to view record images. http://www.findmypast.com/freeweekend.
If
you already subscribe to Findmypast, you’ll benefit from the free-access
period, too: your subscription will be extended by three days.
I have a question: What are legacy names with
regard to temple name submission?
FamilySearch’s
Answer:
new.FamilySearch and Family Tree
both use the same temple list. Therefore, closing access to new.FamilySearch
does not in any way effect a patrons Family Tree temple list. The same is not true, with Temple Ready
and other systems in use prior to new.FamilySearch. Temple Ready and new.FamilySearch are incompatible. If a
patron has names reserved under Temple Ready, those “Legacy” names must be
transferred to Family Tree. A person may claim their own Legacy contributions
or they may claim the Legacy of contributions of a deceased, incapacitated or
excommunicated family member.
Something to think about- Why You
Should be Printing Your Digital Photos:
“Professional
photographers’ aside, for most people below a certain age the idea of printing a photograph seems hopelessly
anachronistic. After all, everything is in the cloud, available to view on any
one of our many personal screens.
But
according to Vint Cerf, one of the “fathers of internet,” printing is the only
way to ensure your shots will last.
In an interview with the BBC, Cerf argued that despite our love affair
with physical and cloud-based digital storage, the chances of our data lasting
long-term are slim to none.
This
is due to a phenomenon known as software rot- not to be confused with the far
more frightening data rot. Rather
than physical degradation software rot is used to define data that becomes
unusable as the hardware and software required to access it disappears. Anyone who’s tried to access old word
processor documents, get data off a floppy disk, or run MS-DOS games know how
annoying it can be.
According
to Cerf, due to the rapid pace at which computing technology is advancing,
preciously digitized information will quickly become unreadable as file formats
and associated software and hardware are abandoned.
Though
Cerf’s warnings are primarily intended for academics and large institutions,
they apply to your personal photos as well. If you want to preserve your memories-your own personal
history-for your descendants, you may want to select a few favorites and invest
in some high-quality prints.”
The
moral of the story? Don’t assume your digital media is safe forever. Print what
you can and backup and update at regular intervals. (James Aitchison, 24 February 2015, found on “The Weekly
Genealogist, Stories of Interest.”
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