Increasing search capabilities will boost use of the product - especially among youth
Recently my family and I were looking through the family search materials / website and app and realized there is a gap in how you find cool and interesting stuff about your ancestors.
The idea is this: we start with a question and then the product enables us through search.
a) Who was the first convert in this particular family line?
b) Who was the first to come to America (or first to move out west)?
c) lower priority but fun questions: who had the most children? most wives? children who died under the age of x? What relatives were part of the Willie/Martin handcart companies?, etc.
Some of these are simple search queries that could pull from the data, but I didn't see a way to do this in any of the tools. The product is set up to click name by name until you discover this information in the "memories" section. It's very tedious and not something a young person would want to do.
In searching for conversion stories, or even just starting with a question, this would be amazing to discover the different types of pioneers in our family line.
Thanks! Happy to answer more questions if you're product team likes this feedback and wants to test it.
Comments
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This is a VERY good point!
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One of the frequently-recurring suggestions or complaints in this Community is variations on "I want to search just MY tree" or "Why can't I search only among MY relatives?"
It's not that easy: how should FS define and delimit its search pool? Should it do the equivalent of a full data download before each search, saving however many generations of your ancestors and however many generations of their descendants? Such downloads can each take hours or days, when you sync your offline software with the Family Tree on FamilySearch. Or should the Find function run the "view relationship" routine against every search result? That could cause each results page to take several minutes to load.
And that's just for simple searches by names and dates.
Your suggestion is asking FS to not only solve the "search only MINE" problem, but to exponentially increase its complexity, by taking that magically-generated subset and looking in it for stray conclusions filed variously under Other Information, Memories, Brief Life History, and possibly other places. I can think of many much more productive uses of FS's limited resources.
If you want to entertain yourself or your family with explorations of "fun facts", I suggest you use offline genealogy software. There are several programs that can fully sync with FS's tree. As I said, the initial download may take a while, but you only need to do that once. The really complex reports may only be available on a paid version of the software, but even the free versions should be able to do things like filtering for immigration events.
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If an artificial intelligence engine were fully trained on the information in Family Tree, searches like these might be a useful capability of that AI. I have no idea what effort would be required to get to that point, but it's an intriguing possibility.
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Several of the suggestions in the original post show up in campaigns from FamilySearch from time to time.
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