Conference Week Announcements and Updates

The main thrust of the FamilySearch speakers at both the BYU Computerized Family History and Genealogy Conference and the National Genealogy Conference was collaboration and bringing the genealogical community together. It has also been strongly suggested that you should not believe any one source, but a collection of sources from a variety of types of records. Please note below the online lessons on Inferential Genealogy.

FamilySearch announced that they released 300 million new names this week to the Beta site at: http://fsbeta.familysearch.org/. (It is also accessible through the Labs site.) I asked if they were only on the beta site and they said that they were also at Record Search Pilot, but that they had a much better search engine on the beta site. All videos shown and all presentations by FamilySearch people refered to the Beta site.

What is the Beta Site? It is the next incarnation of familysearch.org. It is supposed to be released this summer, but it was supposed to be released last summer also. You might want to check it out since there is a change coming, and it is a big change.

FamilySearch has added several new courses through both familysearch.org and fsbeta.familysearch.org. One of the most remarkable ones is Inferential Genealogy presented by Dr. Thomas W. Jones. It can be found at: http://broadcast.lds.org/elearning/fhd/community/cbig/player.html. We were given a preview at a lunch presentation by Don Anderson, FHL Director among other FS positions. I had not heard of Inferential Genealogy previously, but it is very good.

If you are wondering how inferential relates to genealogy, here are a trio of definitions that may help: 1) of reasoning proceeding from general premises to a necessary and specific conclusion; 2) derived or capable of being derived by inference; 3) based on interpretation; not directly expressed. It is an inter-active presentation.

Wednesday night at an Ancestry event they made three announcements.
1) The search screen is changing -- again! They have found that many people do not enter dates and places so they are simplifying their search screen, but it can be expanded to add as much information as desired.
2) Last month they announced that they had sold their printing business. They announced that they are putting The Source and Red Book online in wiki format which can be accessed at no charge. It is coming "well before the end of the year".
3) They are in the final stages of development of Family Tree Maker for MAC. For all of you Mac users, this may be good news. I asked them if it was going to be possible to transfer all information from PC programs, including sources, images and events. The short answer was "Yes". Please remember that they are not NFS certified and no one is talking about it.