Demo: Searching FamilySearch Record Images That Haven't Been Transcribed (Indexed)

hello everybody thank you for joining us on our demo of explore images i'm michelle barber i work on the user experience design team for family search where we get to design lots of fun products and experiences you all use on family search and this is john alexander hello i'm john and i'm a experience manager at familysearch.org and i get to work on explore images and help people try and find and use our historical images for their research so happy to be here awesome thanks everybody uh first john can you just tell us tell me what explore images is and how somebody would come about using that on family search yeah let's start by just going to familysearch.org i'm going to share my screen and uh this is just familysearch.org our landing page and and we're going to be talking about uh this category under search called images um hopefully most people are familiar with doing our searches on records historical records which are what comes out of our indexes when you click on this images button you're searching on everything including and especially those things that are not indexed and so this is what the the product looks like michelle so again you would go search and then images from there from the menu here again yep okay so it's the second one down at least for right now search and then images awesome and then get taken to this home page yeah and uh this is this is really um a couple of things that you're going to see are first is we have this image counter and just a little bit about right now where we we have about 4.3 billion images wow 4.3 billion with a b yeah it's a lot more than anyone could look at in their lifetime but what this includes is is family search started microfilming uh genealogical records all the way back in the 1930s so we amassed this giant microfilm collection in the last couple decades we've been transitioning all of that to digital so this 4.3 billion is the sum total of all of our digital microfilm the microfilm that we've digitized plus our we have about 300 digital cameras operating around the world at any given time and so as all that's coming in at once every day in fact on a typical day we add one or two million images all being made available here in explore historical images so when you say there's cameras out there you mean people are going out into i'm assuming libraries and archives taking pictures of these records and sending them to family search that's exactly right so we work with institutions all over the world um we we we get agreements with them we send in digital cameras and we capture the images again between one and two million images every day so this this counter is actually real um that's the number of images that we're adding today um one one thing that we're we do to try and highlight what's coming in and i guess i'd add another thought we've been really working on this system and working on how fast content is available online on our website in years past it would have taken you know months and sometimes years of processing and cataloging before things were added to the website and now we're we we have an internal goal and a policy that we make content available within 24 hours and so stuff is just coming in and being added um all the time so 24 hours from the time someone clicks the camera in an archive in let's say south america 24 hours later it's on the website on family search yeah and it it sometimes it's a little longer just in fairness because we might have to ship something but it's 24 hours from the time the images are ingested into our system but yeah um i i want to show this if i click on this view the most recently added images what we're looking at now this is a search that's looking at the all of the content that we've added in the last two weeks so right away i can see we're looking at information from the democratic republic of the congo and then i'm just going to move this we i really like this map view that people can click on the upper right part of their screen and what we're going to now do is this is the exact same query and i'm going to kind of focus this map because it's so big the world is so big but now we're kind of showing a different visual in the show we were talking about those 300 cameras our microfilm scanners this is a visualization of of what we've added in explore images in just the last two weeks literally from all over the world literally so you can see we're all over china we've got stuff in africa latin america europe um and this this can be if there if people have so what one thing we hear about people are looking for wanting to see records from a certain area this can be a good place to check because you never know if you have ancestors in spain we've added 4 000 um results in the last two weeks and we're gonna you know month over month this changes you can come in you can you can look more detailed look in the areas of spain where we actually are adding content and um this is a way to get access to content you know long before it's going to be indexed and available as searchable records that's great so if i had an area of the world say a country that i'm really specific on that hasn't had a lot of records available i can just keep an eye waiting to see if they pop up on there and check and you know it this bear in mind so i'm looking every this this is telling me this is spain for the last two weeks it's easy to just x off this last two weeks and then update and you can come in and say i want to know everything that family search has from spain we have over a half a million books or um you know rolls of film lots and lots of content you can look more specific in different areas you can you could look at like a province and then um uh right look at different record types within them there's a lot of really advanced tools for people who want to understand what family search has and understand what they can use in their research okay that's a lot of awesome features there but can you show me just how i would use this as a patron i'm not really wanting to look at the most recent things i'm looking for let's say a specific person in my family how would i go about doing that question so this is like so much information we're feeling tons of overload so i'm gonna i'm gonna restart and we're gonna go all the way back to the beginning so if if you're here for the very first time michelle you're wondering how can i use this realistically to be beneficial to me the best thing i recommend to do is to start with the place where your ancestors are from and uh and and and that will start giving you an idea of what might be there so uh not long ago i was working to um uh working with a family search employee who had the same question like how could we use this and she mentioned that she had family in the very small town of delta utah and that's where her family was from and and she said i don't even know family search has anything in delta maybe not and i said honestly i do not know let's go find out so just one question before you hop from there so even if i'm looking for a specific person you're telling me i should start by looking where they're from rather than searching by their name yeah in this case because typically we get name-based searches after we do the indexing of records okay and and when you're looking here you're looking what if there's stuff that what hasn't been indexed that's not going to give me a result based on a name search so so then you start looking at places or events in that person's life um where where people might be so again we're going to just check delta and the the result was maybe disappointing because we only have five uh books or things from delta and and when we started looking through these we could see that these were obituaries in fact um this was this is like a scrapbook of obituary someone was took the newspaper in delta cut out all the obituaries over years put them in scrapbooks and then gave them to family search put them on on our website um her her family surname you can see in the volume column over here that it looks like these were organized alphabetically by surname and her family surname in this case was shepard so we came to this group right here that started with the s's so once you click on one of those results we bring you right in and start showing you the images and it gives you a sense of the kind of content you're looking at michelle and and this book was really interesting because it was pretty clear that someone previously had typed up an index at the beginning of the book and then you know so you can kind of see the change where we've got a typed index it's like a list and that's amazing and then you get into like this these scrapbooks so someone's done a lot of work here and it's certainly something we can use so if i zoom in on the images you can see we're right here in the s's and all we're gonna do is i'm again looking for the last name shepard so we're in sa sc and this is the browse images part michelle like again because these aren't indexed we have these haven't gone through family search indexing the the most challenging part is when you get to these images people actually have to spend time coming through them and looking for what they can and that can take time but it can also yield some really cool results so one more image and we looked and said okay we've got a couple shepherds and her response was well quinn t shepherd was my grandfather so that's definitely a match i said okay we're onto something so here's like another kind of interesting thing or a little tip it says page 50 in this in this particular scrapbook is where her her grandfather is so i kind of have to do some math and and it's it's not too complicated but just looking right here you can see that i think that image number one is there image 22 is page number one so i'm going to add 50 to 22 and i'm just going to type in 72 and click enter and i was it didn't get me exactly there i got close that's what page are you on now on your page 51. pretty good one so now i gotta back up but now here we are on page 50 and here we are with an obituary for queen quinn t shepherd so uh this ended up being a really great find she never seen this obituary were able to attach it to the tree she was able to share it to family and it kind of started off as this really basic question of do is it would there be something for my family in there i have family in delta utah you in just five or six minutes finding a record an image with really great content and great information that again is not indexed you couldn't just type in quinte shepard and find this you have to come in and find it yourself so i think that's what a lot of us are used to doing especially where we live in a google world you put in one thing and you're expecting one result of exactly what you're looking for and sometimes that does happen on family search with indexed records and it's awesome but there's also a lot that we might be missing if we only if we stop there and no question if we could index everything we would without a doubt that's the goal yeah that's what you need people's help indexing but the reality is michelle is only about one fifth twenty percent of our content is indexed on familysearch.org and we're actually adding images faster than we can index them so we're falling behind and we're doing a lot of things to help solve that problem and we'll continue to see more and more indexed records but if you're at a brick wall if you can't find things that are indexed in areas of your family where you're doing research then these historical images are are a great place to look and find because there's a very good chance that the answer to your brick wall your gold mine is somewhere in these images and and we're just trying to help people find them it's again 4.2 billion it's so much um but uh we're hopefully we you you could still find and be successful here yeah because there's clues like you said there's the places that have there and then once you look within the book there's some more clues like that index was fantastic and so it's not elena zach there's clues if you knew a birth year but you won you wanted to find a birth record with parents that's a great clue so you have a where they might be born you can look for birth records and and look on those years and you know you can really filter down so hopefully you're not having to go through hundreds of images but we can get you down to a subset where you're able to go through you know a handful of images like like this we were you know and this is a good example of getting there really quickly sometimes it's not this easy but it's um a lot of the content is here that's great and super rewarding and i see the attach to family tree button in the top right and this one you got here then um and we wanted to go through this and you just click this attach to family tree it would walk you through our process to attach this record directly to the tree um you know you can download the image there's a lot of things that you can do once you find um your ancestor again downloading is just here there's this this down arrow button right and so there's there's lots of things we're hoping you can do once you find your images yeah family members are going to love when you find things like this totally awesome anything else to add about explore images no i don't think so try it out if you have any issues click this feedback button at the bottom let us know your successes your challenges failures whatever and we're going to continue to make this a better experience and make all of these historical records we're bringing in accessible and available for people to find their ancestors okay awesome well thanks so much john and thank you all for joining us for this demo okay thank you so much you

Channel: FamilySearch

Views: 40,292

Rating: 4.9602275 out of 5

Keywords: family search, how to use familysearch, genealogy record search, how to do genealogy research for free, familysearch catalog, historical images, how to find family history, family history research, genealogy research tips, family search tips, genealogy research, family history, familysearch genealogy, how to use familysearch website, family tree, how to use familysearch.org, genealogy research guide

Id: P1J3kQ3uAQQ

Length: 16min 30sec (990 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 21 2021