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.