Find-A-Record Preview: Research Assistant

[Justin York]

We'll be releasing a new feature soon which we're tentatively calling Research Assistant. It combines data from your tree with Find-A-Record data to create a research hub; at least that's the vision. Think the Find-A-Record Chrome extension on steroids. You can see a demo of it on YouTube: http://youtu.be/cYIr_tMtQE0

At first it will only work with the FamilySearch Family Tree but we hope to expand it to other trees. In the future. The entry point at first 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 ancestor page at Find-A-Record as opposed to the three BMD links.

We would like to get feedback on this.

* Would you use it?

* What would make it better?

* Are we doing anything wrong?

[Daniel Zappala]

Nice. Things that would make this even better:

1) Go through the first four generations and show only those individuals who are missing information. This could be missing a death date or missing a source for a death date. Then this would be targeted to helping me fill in missing information.

2) Allow me to enter research notes, to keep track of what I have done so far, and what records I have looked at.

3) Allow me to save people I'm working on into various todo lists or projects ("my English ancestors", or "my ancestors from Shoreditch").

4) Give me some indication of progress -- what I did over the past month, how many records found, sources attached, people completed, etc.

[Dallan Quass]

Looks like a great start.  Decorating the people with # sources attached and # research opportunities would be pretty important I think.  Also, there's a distinction between missing a death date and a death date without any sources. Can you distinguish between those two cases when decorating the people in the initial list?

In general, would it be possible to show a progress bar for each individual? What would that progress bar look like? Could it show how far along the individual is on being fully documented according to the genealogical proof standard? Is there a better measure of completeness? Would you want to take into account the number of sources available for that particular place and time period?

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[Justin York]

Great feedback. It's all starting to sound very familiar, like an app I once worked on at BYU...

You can try it now at https://www.findarecord.com/research/familysearch

Showing progress is a hard problem. The easiest way would be based on whether the basic info is filled in, but that's ignores whether they are backed by sources. Even if you made the requirement "basic info is documented and backed by at least one source", how do you judge the reliability of the source?

[Enno Borgsteede]

Justin,

> Great feedback. It's all starting to sound very familiar, like an app
> I once worked on at BYU...
>
> You can try it now at https://www.findarecord.com/research/familysearch

I just tried, and got two messages saying We cannot search Find-A-Record
without both a place and a year. They appear for born and died, but
census recommendations work ok.

I got these for a grandfather who was born and died in Amsterdam, The
Netherlands, and birth and death data are normalized.

regards,

Enno

[Justin York]

Enno, could you send me the ID of your grandfather? Or any other person where that occurs. I'll look into it.

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[Laura Cutler]

This is great! I would definitely use it, and this would be a good first-step for people I help get started on family history research.
A few thoughts for future development, if you're interested:
If a woman has a spouse recorded, would it be possible to search under her married name for the years after her marriage? I can see how that could get complicated with multiple spouses or divorces, but it's just a thought.
I'm getting suggestions to search in records that my person already has sources attached. For example, an ancestor whose "attached sources" include the 1910 census from familysearch also has a suggestion that I "find more records" in that same census. It'd be nice if it was filtered to only include the sources that I don't already have attached to my person.

[Justin York]

Great feedback Laura.

 

If a woman has a spouse recorded, would it be possible to search under her married name for the years after her marriage? I can see how that could get complicated with multiple spouses or divorces, but it's just a thought.

We hope to do that when we add marriage events to the page. The reasons why we haven't added marriages yet are: 1) it requires many more API calls and 2) allowing for n marriages on the page will like demand some UI changes. But I can't wait until it happens because it will be very useful.

 

I'm getting suggestions to search in records that my person already has sources attached. For example, an ancestor whose "attached sources" include the 1910 census from familysearch also has a suggestion that I "find more records" in that same census. It'd be nice if it was filtered to only include the sources that I don't already have attached to my person.

It's easy for us to filter out results from FamilySearch if you already have a source attached, but it's difficult to match a 1910 census from FS to a 1910 census from Ancestry. Actually, censuses are pretty trivial if you tokenize the titles and do some basic processing, but you can see that it wouldn't scale very well to other record types.

Our ideal scenario is that the user could tell us they've already found a record from that collection, or that they already searched the collection and didn't find anything, and then we stop showing it in the results (and perhaps do the auto-matching when possible). Does that sound useful? Is there a better way we could it?

Thanks again.

- Justin