You’ve probably heard about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ (LDS) ambitious plans to digitize all of the Family History Library’s microfilmed records and post them online. You also may be aware that the church’s FamilySearch Indexing project has an army of 100,000-plus volunteers indexing a million names a day from those same records. But did you know there’s a special Web site where you can view the fruits of their labor to date?

LDS set up the FamilySearch Record Search Pilot Site as a public landing strip for those digitized records and indexes—covering 500 million names at press time—until the new search engine gets integrated into the main FamilySearch Web site.

As the site explains, “pilot” means it’s a work in progress: As the search engine team gathers data on how people are using the site, FamilySearch may add new functions or change navigation. The site might be unavailable at times due to back-end programming or new record groups being added. Some changes will be visible; others, merely behind-the-scenes enhancements that make the data easier to use and access.

For average family historians, the Pilot Site presents an opportunity to influence perhaps the biggest genealogy project the world has ever seen. FamilySearch actively solicits feedback—through a link in the site’s top frame, you can report problems, request enhancements or simply offer comments. Here we give you seven tips to enjoy the convenience of viewing original images, searching vital-records indexes and helping to test drive one of the slickest search engines that genealogy has to offer.

 

Source:  familytreemagazine.com