Choose How Many Generations to Search

We just added a new feature which allows you to search a specific number of generations. On the left side you'll see a new options titled "How many generations?" This controls how far Find-A-Record will search through your tree.

When Find-A-Record has finished searching through the number of generations you chose, it will show a "Load another generation" button. Clicking that button will resume the search through one more generation. If you started with 4 generations then it will search through the 5th generation after clicking the "Load another generation" button. When the search is finished through that generation it will show the "Load another generation" button again.

This replaces the previous "infinite scrolling" behavior that would only load when you scrolled to the bottom of the list. Now that you tell Find-A-Record how far to search, you can start a search and leave it alone to load automatically. Want to search 15 generations for all ancestors with record hints? Now you can.

Find-A-Record Firefox Extension

We just released the Find-A-Record browser extension for Firefox. After installing, you will see a gray Find-A-Record pin in the browser's toolbar. If you click the icon when it's gray then you will be sent to Find-A-Record with you as the starting point for generating research opportunities.

The pin will turn its normal blue and orange color when you are visiting an ancestor's page in the FamilySearch Family Tree. Clicking the colored pin will open Find-A-Record with your ancestor as the starting point.

We also have an extension for Google Chrome.

Retiring the Record Search

We regret to announce that we will be retiring the Record Search feature of Find-A-Record before the end of October.

In September 2013 we set out to solve the problem of searching geographically for genealogy records. After many months of exciting and hard work, we took our solution to RootsTech 2014 where we received overwhelmingly positive feedback. But we soon ran into two problems:

1. Only some genealogists really understood how useful Find-A-Record was.

2. Acquiring and processing both the record data and the geographic data was much more expensive and difficult than we anticipated.

We decided to build the Research Assistant to tackle the first problem by showing how the Record Search data was useful for research. The Research Assistant is now much more popular than the Record Search and it no longer relies on the record data.

Inside our desire to search geographically for records was a more fundamental desire to make genealogy research easier and more approachable for beginners. The Research Assistant is an important step forward in that direction and there is still much more we can do. By retiring the Record Search, we can focus our resources on enhancing the Research Assistant and decreasing the barrier of entry for aspiring genealogists.

Find-A-Record Chrome Extension

The Find-A-Record Chrome Extension is a popular tool for making Find-A-Record features quickly accessible from inside FamilySearch and Ancestry trees. Because the Record Search is being retired, the features of the Chrome extension will be dramatically simplified. Ancestry trees will no longer be supported. The only feature that will remain is linking to the Research Assistant from an ancestor in the FamilySearch Family Tree.

If you liked the birth, marriage, and death record search features of the Chrome extension then we recommend trying the RootsSearch Chrome extension as a replacement. It behaves in a similar manner while supporting many more genealogy websites.

New Options for the Research Assistant

Today we added options to the Research Assistant. Now you can limit the search to specific portions of your tree via a drop-down menu on the left side.

As the help page explains:

• Ancestors - Only searches through your direct ancestors. These are the people that would appear in a pedigree or fan chart. This does not include descendants, collateral lines, nor additional spouses of ancestors that you do not descend from (i.e. your great-grandfather's second wife).
  
• Descendants - Only searches through your direct descendants. This does not include spouses.
  
• Ancestors and Descendants - Searches through both your direct ancestors and descendants. This does not include collateral lines, additional spouses of ancestors that you do not descend from (i.e. your great-grandfather's second wife), nor the spouses of descendants.
  
• Cousins - Searches through your ancestors, descendants, and the descendants of your ancestors (cousins). This does not include spouses.
  
• Everyone - Searches through anyone connected to your tree. Gives preference to your direct ancestors and descendants, while still allowing collateral lines to be visited if you don't have many direct ancestors and descendants or if they don't have many research opportunities that we can find.

How will you use these new options? Are there other options that you would like to have?

Using the Research Assistant to Participate in the LDS Youth Temple Challenge

LDS youth were recently extended the temple challenge by Elder Neil L. Andersen. He challenged the youth to take their own names to the temple - every time they go. The hardest part of this challenge is finding names that are ready for temple work.

The Find-A-Record Research Assistant makes it easy to find names that are ready. Just sign in with your FamilySearch username and password. Once you're done signing in, the Research Assistant will immediately begin searching your tree for many types of genealogy research opportunities.

For the youth doing temple work, they're just interested in the LDS ordinances of baptism and confirmation. So we can turn off all of the other categories by clicking on the checkbox next to them.

Now the list will be filtered to only show us ancestors that are ready for their baptism and confirmation to be reserved. If you descend from LDS pioneers then it could take a few minutes to find someone.

Click on one of the results to see details about the ancestor and the ordinances that are ready to be reserved.

Click the blue "Reserve Ordinances" button to continue the reservation process at FamilySearch.org.

Watch out for warnings about possible duplicates, such as in the image below. This means FamilySearch has detected a very similar person that already has their ordinances done. It's best to ignore these and leave them for more experienced genealogists to resolve.

Watch the demo below for further help using the Research Assistant to find LDS ordinances.

View a List of Record Hints for Your Ancestors in FamilySearch

In the Find-A-Record Research Assistant, you can now see record hints for your ancestors. Record hints are generated by FamilySearch as a list of suggestions for records that match your ancestor. They help you quickly find your ancestor in the billions of records that FamilySearch has.

Record hints are in the green Sources category and are turned on by default. They will begin to appear in your list of research opportunities.

If you just want to see record hints, you can turn all other opportunity types off.

Click on one of the "Record Hints" cards to see a list of collections with matching records. In the example below, Reita Luvilla Thurman has three possible record matches in "Utah Marriage, 1887-1966", "Utah, County Marriages, 1887-1937", and "United States Census, 1940".

Click the "Review these matches" link to see review the list of matches in FamilySearch and attach the proper sources.

You can read more about Record Hints and how to properly review them on the FamilySearch blog.

Research Assistant Update: Disable Specific Opportunities

Last week we announced impending updates to the Research Assistant's opportunity list. Based on feedback, we made some changes to the design and released it over the weekend.

Our goal with this update was to allow users to turn off specific opportunity types. Previously, you could only turn off an entire category by clicking on the buttons at the top of the page.

Now the list of categories is on the left side of the page. When you click on a category bar it will expand to show you all available opportunity types in that category.

Click on one of the opportunity types in the category list to disable it. Click it again to re-enable it.

Click on the checkbox in the color bar to disable or enable all opportunity types in that category.

This update makes it easier to focus on the type of work that you are interested in. It also paves the way for adding many new types of opportunities, such as record hints.

Try it out now at https://www.findarecord.com/research/familysearch.

Feedback Request: New Opportunities List Design

We are working on a new design for the Research Assistant opportunities list and would love to have your feedback about it.

The primary driver behind the new design is the ability to turn individual opportunities on or off. Right now you can turn off an entire category. If you just wanted to find Problems then you could turn Source, Person, Relationships, and Cleanup opportunities off. However, there is no way to turn off "Marriage with no Children" while keeping "Person Died Before They Were Born" turned on.

Here's the current list.

Here's the new design.

• We moved the category buttons from the top over to the left and made them expandable so that you can turn off opportunities individually.
• There are "All" and "None" buttons at the bottom of the categories so that you don't have to click 13 times to disable all of the Cleanup opportunities.
• Your settings for which opportunities are enabled and disabled will be saved in the browser you're using. If you switch to a different browser or device then you'll lose your settings. We will sync the settings between browsers and devices once we've settled on the design.
• Some people didn't realize that you can click on the cards to see more so we added a "Details" button that appears when the mouse hovers over the card.
• We made the list one column instead of two which gave us more room to add content to the cards such as the person's photo, summary information, and relationship popup.

You can try this out now on our beta website at https://beta.findarecord.com. Just remember it's a beta site primarily used for development and testing; we make no guarantees about it's reliability or availability.

We would love to have your feedback on this. Is this an improvement? Does it make sense? What do you like about it? What do you wish was different? Leave a comment below or use the Feedback link at the top of findarecord.com.

Find-A-Record Chrome Extension Update

The Find-A-Record Chrome Extension has been updated with a popup in the URL bar. The popup is revealed by clicking the Find-A-Record pin in the URL bar. This will be available on both Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org.

This update created a more consistent experience and allowed us to bring back old functionality such as the Source Analyzer for FamilySearch. It will also make it easier for us to add support for more websites in the future.

The Find-A-Record Chrome Extension can be downloaded from the Chrome Web Store.

Viewing Relationship Paths in the Research Assistant

The Research Assistant tells you how you are related to people in your opportunities list. For example, it tells me that Femina Besella Stewart is my 2nd Great-Grandmother.

Now I can see who is in the relationship between me and Elisabeth. When viewing the details of that opportunity, there will be a "View Relationship" link next to the relationship.

When you click the "View Relationship" link it will open a popup that shows the relationship path.

It can also handle more complex relationships, such as detecting that Sarah Rebecca White is Mary Van Noski's Grandson's Wife's Great-Aunt.

This was inspired by the relationship popup in the Memories section of FamilySearch.

More Research Opportunities and LDS Ordinances

We just updated the Find-A-Record Research Assistant to add new features and more research opportunities.

View Opportunities For An Ancestor

The list of opportunities is generated by scanning your tree starting with you and working out towards your ancestors. This makes the list of opportunities roughly ordered by how closely related someone is to you. But what if you wanted to view opportunities for your 4th-great-grandmother and her family? There are now two ways to do this.

When viewing the details of an opportunity, you can click the "Ancestor's Opportunities" button. This will reload the opportunities list with that ancestor as the starting point.

The Find-A-Record Chrome Extension was also updated to send users to the new Research Assistant from inside the FamilySearch Family Tree. The Find-A-Record pin appears in the address bar when viewing an ancestor profile in the Family Tree. Clicking it will send you to the Research Assistant opportunity list with that ancestor as the starting point.

More Research Opportunities

We added more research opportunities:

• Children born before their parents marriage
• A person that has no name
• A person with poorly formatted names
• A person with duplicate names

We create an open source library called fs-check which we use to generate the research opportunities. You can read it's documentation to see a list of all possible research opportunities.

Do you have any ideas for additional research opportunities? Leave a comment below or send use the feedback link at the top of every page on our main site.

LDS Ordinances

Another significant update is that LDS users will begin to see opportunities about LDS ordinances. An opportunity will appear when someone is found that has ordinances which are ready to be reserved.

New Version of the Find-A-Record Research Assistant

Today we released a new version of the Find-A-Record Research Assistant. It is now focused on finding specific research opportunities for you. It scans your tree in FamilySearch and tells you where work needs to be done. Our goal is to help beginners get started with their research and to help experienced genealogists when they don't know where to work next.

There are five different types of opportunities:

1. People who are missing information, such as birth or death facts.
2. People who are missing relationships, such as parents or spouses.
3. People with information that is not supported by a record.
4. People with information that is obviously wrong, such as dying before you were born.
5. People with messy and duplicate data, such as multiple events for the same marriage.

Each opportunity contains specific details that guide you through the research. We tell you where to search for records and how to update information in the Family Tree.

While working on this new version, we often got sucked into doing research because the Research Assistant makes it so easy to be productive. We know it will be helpful for you too.

Updates to Research Assistant and the Chrome Extension

The Find-A-Record Research Assistant has been updated to now display information about marriages. For each spouse a person had, the records attached to that relationship in the Family Tree will be shown. If a marriage date and place is available for the relationship then we will also show collections where you might be able to find marriage records.

The Find-A-Record Chrome Extension was updated so that it now sends you to the Research Assistant from ancestor profiles in the FamilySearch Family Tree. Previously, the B M D buttons displayed prominently on the left side of the screen. We have removed those and instead put in icon on the right side of the URL bar, as is more conventional for Chrome Extensions. When the icon is clicked, it will send you to the Research Assistant page for that ancestor.

Old buttons inserted by the Find-A-Record Chrome Extension

New URL icon inserted by the Find-A-Record Chrome Extension

This change only affects the FamilySearch Family Tree. The B M D buttons will still appear in Ancestry member trees.

Discovering Fred Kiefer's First Wife

During the development and testing of the Find-A-Record Research Assistant, it helped me find the SSDI entry of many of my ancestors including my great-grandfather Fred William Kiefer. Fred was born March 16, 1883 in Oakley, Summit, Utah. On September 9, 1924 he married Ida Dolder. Fred died January 30, 1964 in Idaho.

While reviewing his profile on the Research Assistant, I noticed the Idaho, Death and Burials collection from FamilySearch. Since his entry in the SDDI index didn't provide too many details, I hoped to find a more helpful death record.

Clicking the Idaho, Deaths and Burials, 1907-1965 link took me to FamilySearch and searched that collection for Fred William Kiefer. One result was found: a death certificate for Nan Kiefer where F. W. Kiefer was listed as the spouse.

This was obviously not my F. W. Kiefer because mine was married to Ida. But there was only one person in that area at that time who ever went by F. W. Kiefer. And then I noticed that Nan died in 1918, six years before Fred married Ida. I needed to know more. A quick search for a marriage record on FamilySearch returned nothing^[1]. I would have to do this the hard way; I would need to learn more about who Nan was.

A search for Nan Kiefer born in Minnesota returned another version of Nan's death record that included an image. F. W. Kiefer wasn't listed as the spouse, he was just listed as the informant. Could we infer that W. W. was the spouse? First, the record didn't have a place to list the spouse. I think that was a huge oversight, especially since they asked for the parents names and places of birth, but nonetheless there was no place on the form to list the spouse. Second, Nan was married (not widowed) and her married surname was Kiefer. With F. W. being listed as the informant, it is most likely that he was the spouse.

Thankfully, Nan's parents were listed on the death record as P. A. Cenell and Mary Munson. Another stroke of luck is that Cenell is a very uncommon name in the U.S. Further searching revealed a wealth of information on Nan (Nannie) and her family^[2] but no definitive evidence that her husband F. W. Kiefer was my great-grandfather Fred.

Then I thought to search for a marriage record on Ancestry instead of FamilySearch. Sure enough, marriage records were available. Even more surprising is that the top results were from collections that were given to Ancestry by FamilySearch. So I returned to FamilySearch determined to defeat the darn search engine and find that marriage record. I accomplished it by doing a collection specific search for Fred Kiefer in Utah Marriages. The birth date and location on the marriage record confirmed that it was my Fred. What a story it revealed.

Nan died from pneumonia and influenza just four years into her marriage with Fred. They had no children. Six years after her death, Fred married Ida Dolder and had two children. Thirty years after Nan's death, Fred's daughter Clara (from his second wife) would also contract pneumonia, only this time the recent development of antibiotics would save her life. Clara is my grandmother, and she's still alive today.

Find-A-Record Research Assistant

We have released a new feature called the Find-A-Record Research Assistant. After logging in to the FamilySearch Family Tree, the Research Assistant helps you find new records for your ancestors.

We would love to receive feedback about the Research Assistant. Leave comments below or use the Feedback link at the top of our website.

Preview of the Find-A-Record Research Assistant

We'll be releasing a new feature soon which we're tentatively calling the Find-A-Record Research Assistant. It combines data from your tree with Find-A-Record data to create a research hub; at least that's the vision. It will be like the Find-A-Record Chrome extension on steroids.

At first it will only work with the FamilySearch Family Tree. We hope to expand it to other trees in the future. At first, the entry point will be via the website as shown in the video, but we will probably update the Chrome Extension to just have one link to the Research Assistant as opposed to the three BMD links.

We would like to get your feedback on this. Would you use it? What could make it better? What do you hope it will do?

WeRelate Adds Find-A-Record Links in the Person Profile

WeRelate has added Find-A-Record search links to all of their person profiles. Below is a picture of the profile for Wyatt Berry Stapp Earp. The links to Find-A-Record are in the top-right corner of the blue header box, just below the share links. When you click the birth link, you are taken to the Find-A-Record search page to search for birth records between 1846 and 1850 that cover Monmouth, Illinois.

The Find-A-Record links appear in the top-right corner of the blue header box, just below the share links.

If there are already sources cited for the birth, marriage, or death event then the respective search link will not appear. Johann Georg Koch has records cited for both his birth and death so only the marriage search link appears. The links also will not appear when there's not enough information to perform a search. James Moses only has a search link for birth because the place of marriage is not known, nor is anything known about his death.

This is the same functionality that the Find-A-Record Chrome Extension provides for FamilySearch and Ancestry trees, with the added bonus here being that it is automatically available for all WeRelate users.

Connecticut Western Reserve

When searching Find-A-Record in Northeastern Ohio, you will sometimes see records for Connecticut. For example, when searching for birth records in Warren, Ohio, the first result is "Connecticut, Births and Christenings, 1649-1906". How could that be? Connecticut is over 400 miles away from Warren, Ohio.

Let's examine the collection details page of "Connecticut, Births and Christenings, 1649-1906", which can be accessed by clicking the "Details" button in the search results. The list of entries to the left of the map contains our clue. Click the first entry which says "1649 - 1800 Connecticut, United States of America". The map will update to show the geographic area that is covered by Connecticut for that time period.

Connecticut owned the Northeastern corner of Ohio until 1800. It was called the Connecticut Western Reserve. Quoting Wikipedia:

The Connecticut Western Reserve was a portion of land claimed by the Colony of Connecticut and later by the state of Connecticut in what is now mostly part of northeastern region of the U.S. state of Ohio. The Reserve had been granted to the Colony by King Charles II. Following the American Revolutionary War, Connecticut gave up claim to some of its western lands, but sold the Western Reserve to developers initially. It finally ceded control of this portion to the United States, and the area was organized under the Northwest Territory, until Ohio was admitted as a state. 

Free, Online, and Military Search Filters

We added the ability to filter Find-A-Record search results based on whether they are free, paid, online, or offline. The only free collections we have right now are from FamilySearch: the free and online collections are the digital collections at FamilySearch while the free and offline collections are from the FamilySearch Catalog. All other collections we currently have are paid and online.

You'll see that we also added the "Military" record type for searching. We have military records from Fold3 and FamilySearch. We will add more military records from Ancestry, the FamilySearch Catalog, and other places in the future.

Our Repositories page contains the full list of sources for our collections, as well as some stats about our coverage.

WorldVitalRecords

Today we added collections from WorldVitalRecords. We were able to import about 20% of the 22 thousand collections that WorldVitalRecords has. That percentage will go up overtime as we continue get better insight into our data and indexing process.

We also increased the number of Ancestry collections from 7% to 26%. You can see the details on our repositories page.

Stay tuned for many more updates on new collections; we expect to add many more in the next few weeks.

Collection Details View

Yesterday we released the new collection details view. Each collection now has its own page that allows you to take a peek into how we indexed the collection.

Above is a screen shot from the collection page for the United States Marriage, 1733-1990 index from FamilySearch. The orange area represents it's coverage between 1803 and 1812. If you search for marriages in Florida in 1805, this collection will not show up.

These new collection pages are beautiful, fun, and useful. We have already identified and fixed several bugs in our indexing process now that we can easily visualize our data. It's also useful for researchers to understand the coverage of particular collections. For example, when searching for records in Eastern New Mexico, it's easy to see why collections from Texas appear in the results.

These new collection detail pages are available from the search results. Just click the "Details" button to open that collection's detail page in a new tab.

FAR Chrome Extension and Data Updates

Two things of note for this week.

The first is that we have updated the Find-A-Record Chrome Extension to work with the new search page. We also setup a redirect on the old search page to send you to the new search page. Now that traffic is no longer hitting the old search page and stressing our database, we can continue importing more data and work on creating the new collection details view.

The second is that we figured out why some of the collections available from FamilySearch were being labeled with incorrect record types. First some background. FamilySearch tags their online collections with information about what record types they contain, which is great news for us. They label things as containing, birth, marriage, death, census, and several other tags. But they also label things as "vital" records. Based on what we were seeing initially, it seemed as though collections were being labeled as "vital" if they contained birth, marriage, and death records. Well, it turns out that's not the case. Take the collection Minnesota, Marriages, 1849-1950. This is labeled as vital and not marriage. Why? We have no clue. Thankfully these inconsistencies seems to be limited to the vital tag. To fix this, we ignore the vital label and generate the list of record types ourselves by parsing the title, as we do with all other data sources. That properly gives us a tag of marriage for Minnesota, Marriages, 1849-1950. Much better.

Working on a New Design

We've decided to create a new search experience on Find-A-Record. Let's look at the current search page.

There are a few things about this that can be improved.

1. The collection results are the most import piece of information, but they're relegated to a portion of the left side of the screen. The map, which is primarily used for searching, takes up most of the screen.
2. The expanse of blue lines covering the US makes little sense to anybody but us. What it's showing is that the collection we hovered over was correctly geocoded to historical boundaries of the US (in this case 1767-1950).
3. The search can be slow when searching on large complicated polygons like the US.
4. The autocomplete for place search doesn't function very well.

Here's a peek at the redesign we're working on.

1. The map will only be used for choosing and displaying the search area.
2. We have more real estate for displaying information about collections, which is what really matters. We will tell you what record types are included in the collection and whether it's free or behind a paywall and whether it's online or offline.
3. The "Search" button will take you to an external web page that allows you to search the collection or gives you instructions on how to access it.
4. The "Details" button will bring up a modal dialog that has more details about the collection, such as a description. It will also allow you to explore all of the different boundaries which the collection was geocoded to. We are making the boundaries of a collection a little more difficult to access because most users don't care and because it significantly improves performance.
5. We will no longer allow you to search on the borders of a country, state, or county. All searches will be radius searches. If you want to search an entire country you will have to expand the size of the circle to envelope it. This isn't perfect because it's impossible to cover all of Russia without getting China and other nearby countries, but Find-A-Record is most useful when optimized for local searches.

We're also in the early stages of developing a mobile app.

RootsTech Recap

We are thrilled Find-A-Record was a Developer Challenge Finalist. This gave us great exposure to the press, to bloggers, to potential customers, and to other genealogy companies. Though we didn't win first place, we did meet many people who are ecstatic about Find-A-Record. We were often told, "It solves my biggest problem!" Find-A-Record was validated: it provides a simple solution to a complex problem that many people have.

Here are our short-term plans:

• Load as much data into Find-A-Record as we can. There are many people interested in using the API. The more data we have, the more useful our API is.
• Harden our API and back end infrastructure. It needs to be reliable, fast, and bug free.
• Find a way to simplify the search experience. We're concerned that the current experience with the large map is overwhelming and confusing. We will be experimenting with alternative designs.

We have a published list of repositories we plan to index collections from in the near future. Let us know if where else we can find valuable data. You'll notice we're mostly focused on the US and UK right now.

Do you have any ideas about how to improve the search experience? We would love to hear them.

Boundary Searching

Boundary searching is now live on Find-A-Record. As shown in the Friday video from last week, you can search for collections within an entire county, state, or country all at once. Don't forget to install the Chrome Extension for an enhanced search experience from within FamilySearch and Ancestry trees. Right now we have collections from Ancestry.com, digital collections from FamilySearch.org, and FamilySearch catalog entries for the UK.

Find-A-Record is still in beta. If you have any ideas for new features or find a bug, please let us know.

We are aware that a lot of collections in England are incorrectly mapped to the country level instead of the county level. We have plans to fix that tomorrow.

_{* This post is a day late because we were heads down preparing for RootsTech yesterday and completely forgot about it.}

We're Going To RootsTech

We will be attending RootsTech on February 6-8 as well as the Innovator Summit on the 5th. Here's what we're looking forward to.

Developer Challenge

We will be entering both Find-A-Record and Open Place Database in the Developer Challenge. The cash prizes are underwhelming but the publicity is priceless. The developer challenge put last years winner, Treelines, on the map and they weren't promised half the attention that even 3rd place will get this year.

FamilySearch Records API

We're hoping for some big news from the session about the FamilySearch Historical Records API. A historical records API that grants access to a collection as vast as FamilySearch's will initiate an exciting new age in the development of genealogy applications.

FamilySearch Partner Services Session

FamilySearch will be hosting a session titled FamilySearch is Open for Business! – What is Partner Services? How Can it Help my Business? We're hoping to hear some announcements about an improved experience for FamilySearch partners, such as self-service developer keys.

Surprises

RootsTech is always full of surprise announcements from companies large and small. What will happen this time?

Meeting People

We're going to meet some friends from RootsDev for breakfast before the Innovator Summit. We look forward to meeting many others over the course of the four days.

Free Lunch

The Innovator Summit includes free* lunch. Who could pass up an opportunity for free lunch?

_{^* Free after the entrance fee, of course.}