Jake Gehring was one of the speakers in the afternoon at the BYU Family History Tech Conference. He works for FamilySearch. I know Jake very well, having worked with him at Heritage Quest for a while, and consider him a good friend. He knows a lot about what’s going on in the tech side of family history.
The following are notes I made during the lecture.
Convenience of Records Access…
At one time we had to go where our ancestors lived to get the records. Then microfilm came along, and we could search at libraries and Family History Centers. Now the images may be online and even searchable! In Jake’s words, the data is often “Ready when you are!”
Availability of Research Conclusions
At one time, your family wasn’t worth writing about if they were not rich – the patricians and prominents got written up.
This has changed. About the time of the bicentennial, genealogies and local histories were being printed at a greater rate than before. Ancestral File, World Family Tree, and so forth were a big step in making data available. These were later consolidated and made available online. Again – it is “Ready when you are!”
Challenges in the publishing field
130 million new digitized images were made by FamilySearch in the field last year. However, digital imaging still isn’t perfect. Quality of images vary. Getting the images to FamilySearch is usually done on hard drives. Streaming is happening, but is fairly new.
Redaction and data-privacy is a huge issue. Laws are getting more restrictive all the time. We need to get ahead of the curve as deals with ID left.
Systems need to continue to be made to get the right conclussions. We need to be able to search all prior work and conclussions – there’s quite a challenge.
FamilySearch only indexes abuot 1/4 of the images it brings in every year. Volunteers have helped a lot, but its not enough. 2012 was the high-year for volunteers at FamilySearch. In 2013, the number of volunteers dropped. 2014 was back up, but not reaching the 2012 level.
Computers can be used to do more work. They can help the human indexers accomplish what has to be done. OCR of newspapers is a good example. As better OCR is developed, newspapers will OCR better. (OCR is Optical Character Recognition)
How about making interviewing easier? How about getting that oral history without even being in the same room, city or even country? Much is yet to be done – and can be done, using tech to make genealogy more accessible and accurate.
