FSCheck - A JavaScript Research Opportunity Finder for the FamilySearch FamilyTree

[John Clark]

FSCheck will look for and return research "opportunities" that a person may be interested in. It ingests FamilySearch SDK objects and produces standardized "opportunity" objects.

The true power of FSCheck becomes apparent when you combine it with FSTraversal. As FSTraversal crawls through the FamilyTree, FSCheck finds and produces research opportunities. 

It produces 5 types of opportunities:

• Problem - Obvious issues, like a person dying before they were born, etc.
• Cleanup - Missing normalized information, duplicated marriage facts, etc.
• Source - Information that does not have a source associated with it, etc.
• Person - New research, such as finding a birth, birth date, death place, etc.
• Family - New research, such as finding missing parents, missing marriage information, etc.

Each opportunity describes what to do to solve or complete each opportunity, and contains the information necessary to create gen-search and/or Find-A-Record searches to assist the person in completing the research.

There is an example page that shows one hard-coded example for each opportunity (there are 26 as of this email).

This library is licensed MIT, so feel free to contribute! Ideas for new checks or making existing checks more useful are always appreciated. Just create an issue.

And now for a wee bit o' foreshadowing. Justin will be making an announcement this week introducing a product that uses both FSCheck and FSTraversal. Stay tuned...

- John C.