FGS Conference, Day 2

The most newsworthy event of the day came during Jay Verkler's keynote presentation. He demonstrated the new collaboration tool that will be available through FamilySearch.org. This will allow users to search the database to find matching individuals among the other pedigrees that have been submitted. They can they attach that individual to their pedigree. This is a much different approach than existed with AncestralFile where a computer algorithim merged two individuals together. What I found when using AncestralFile is that the algorithm sometimes mismatched two people, and frequently could not identify that two persons were the same when a trained researcher can clearly see they are the same.

The announcement and demonstration was so subtle that I wonder is everyone understood what they were seeing. Jay didn't announce a date when this would be available, but I would think that it should be sometime soon. After the presentation there was a small crowd that gathered around them to ask more questions, but most everyone headed off to the exhibit hall to gorge themselves on the freebies. It will be interesting to see how this new tool (whatever they are going to call it) is received by the genealogical community.

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