Add Link To Digital Images Not Indexed On Individuals Detail Page

Vicki Thauvin

Now that the microfilms have all been digitized I think it would be very helpful to researchers if there was a link on the detail pages (where the links to FamilySearch records search, Ancestry, Find My Past, etc. are listed) that takes us to the images that haven't been indexed. Yes, I know this would be more geographical link not a specific name link. However, it could help people think beyond just names when researching.

Julia Szent-Györgyi

The closest I can think of to something like this are Search - Catalog and Search - Images, but neither of those have a search interface that's even remotely robust enough to manage anything useful. (If you look for Balassagyarmat, but it's in there as Balassa-Gyarmat, they'll cheerfully lie to you that it doesn't exist.) This means that as a means of broadening people's search horizons, they'd be a miserable failure.

Even if the search interfaces were improved somehow for the Catalog and Images, I don't think a direct link from a profile would necessarily work: the location of records is too often different from the location of the events recorded in said records, and the way records are cataloged adds yet more ambiguity. You need to know at least a little bit about the records you're looking for in order to find them.

Another consideration is that "digitized" is not equivalent to "online" or even "accessible": FamilySearch's all-or-nothing approach to the enforcement of access restrictions (such as privacy laws) means that a lot of images have become entirely inaccessible since the cessation of microfilm lending.

The idea may have merit as a long-term goal, but at some point, "just index it all already" seems more useful.... (They're working on teaching computers to read handwriting. It may come within our lifetimes.)

Gena Margaret Weatherford

WHY did you leave

BIG exclamation "!" in

what I wrote?