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.