ROOTS & BRANCHES

There are sometimes when I get a real kick out of how items end up being displayed on my Facebook feed.

Like when there are consecutive comments from a high school friend, a colleague from a former job, a college buddy, and then a genealogy acquaintance … people who’ve never met in the real world (Truthfully, in the case of genealogy acquaintances—sometimes people I haven’t met in the real world!).

But last month it was two Facebook Friends who I know both virtually and personally from the genealogy community, whose diametrically opposed posts about a new FamilySearch.org feature called the “Explore Historical Images” tool came up consecutively on my Facebook wall.

First some background: FamilySearch is the brand for the genealogy efforts of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the world’s largest free family history site, which is in the process of converting billions of records from around the world, many of which the church microfilmed decades ago, into digital format.

In some cases, the records have been indexed and therefore are name searchable on FamilySearch. But most of the records are only “browsable,” meaning you can look at the original documents online but they won’t come up in the indexes on FamilySearch (There’s also a goodly number of digitized record sets that are restricted in some way, which is an issue for another time!).

The Explore Historical Images tool is designed for those browsable-only images, which, got my two Facebook Friends a-posting.

First was Jill Morelli, a Certified Genealogist from the Pacific Northwest who’s a popular lecturer and journal-published author, who enthused: “Game Changer! FamilySearch just announced their image only search engine! … Now you can put in a location and get the image-only docs related to that location.”

Close on her heels was Michael John Neill from the American Heartland of Illinois, who produces the “Genealogy Tip of the Day” as well as lectures, webinars and chaperones trips to major genealogy repositories. His take: “That new FamilySearch tool at this point looks unimpressive.”

I took Explore Historical Images for a test drive myself and while I’m probably more inclined toward Neill’s first blush about the tool, I’ll admit that maybe after years of using the Family History Library Catalog (an electronic version of the old library card catalogs, also online at FamilySearch), I’m a bit stuck in my ways.

Explore Historical Images has the user type in a place name (advanced search asks also for a date and a type of ancestor event or distinction such birth, marriage, occupation, etc.), and the tool searches FamilySearch’s digital-only collections and returns relevant record collections. 

What I found is that the record collections returned are sometimes too vague to be helpful (which was Neill’s complaint, too); however, Morelli’s right that these browsable-only collections are way underused by genealogists and if Explore Historical Images increases their use, that can only be a good thing.