Could this become a "Community Project"?

Russel Jenks

I recently returned from a family research trip to Germany. While visiting one of the protestant churches where my family records are found, I was given copies of Excel spreadsheet which include the indexed church records from the late 1500's to the late 1800's. In total there are 4 sheets with a total of over 22,000 lines of data on births, deaths and marriages. Would there be any way to draft help (perhaps a group) in entering these names into Family Search?

Maile L

Mod note: This discussion was moved from Get Involved to General Questions.

Julia Szent-Györgyi

It is highly likely that the vast majority of those people are already in the Tree, because most of those church registers were part of the International Genealogical Index, and nearly all of the people in the IGI were the basis of profiles in FS's prior systems that served as the "seed" for the current Family Tree.

A randomly-found example:

IGI: https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/2:1:MF1F-MXB

Indexed record: https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QPPV-WN86

Tree profile: https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/details/MF1F-MZP.

MaureenE123

@Russel Jenks

I am not connected with FamilySearch

You could try contacting the FamilySearch Library to see whether they would be interested in receiving a copy of your Excel Spread sheet for the collection (although my own view is probably not), but if they did accept a copy, I doubt whether there would be interest in doing any indexing as I think they would want to restrict indexing to their own microfilms.

Another avenue may be to upload to the Internet Archive in some format. I do not know whether it is possible to upload Excel spread sheets, but you could enquire about possible options from info @ archive.org (delete the spaces). Perhaps it may be possible to upload a small explanatory pdf and on the book page embed a link to the Excel spread sheet, but you would need to for the Internet Archive Team to be agreeable.

MandyShaw1

My feeling is that this is a secondary source, a bit like a family genealogy book, but with the big advantage that we know where all its primary sources are. So it's a great backup to, or potentially gap filler for, FS and other providers' collection indexes. On that basis, would FS not accept it as a Book/Catalog entry? It surely can't be the first such thing they've added to their holdings that is digital from scratch? This has to be one of many such digital secondary sources out there that could do with an intelligent and properly curated repository, which honestly the Internet Archive could not provide in my view.

Re Searching

If you feel up to a challenge: You could try creating a formula in the spreadheet to construct the correct URL to perform a search.

For example, to search for
Jurgen Krantz born 1880 in Sachsenhausen, Thuringia, Germany

you would need to construct a URL such as:

https://www.familysearch.org/search/all-collections/results/?q.givenName=Jurgen&q.surname=Krantz&q.birthLikeDate.from=1880&q.birthLikePlace=Sachsenhausen%2C%20Thuringia%2C%20Germany

If the spreadsheet had the name in cells B2 and C2, d.o.b in D2, the place in E2 and the country in F2, then

in cell , say H2, put
="https://www.familysearch.org/search/all-collections/results/?q.givenName=" & B2 & "&q.surname=" & C2 & "&q.birthLikeDate.from=" & D2 & "&q.birthLikePlace=" & E2 & "%2C%20" & F2

You might need to fiddle a bit to manage commas and spaces etc. On a Mac using the Numbers spreadsheet I had to build it into a hyperlink formula e.g. =HYPERLINK( then the constructed URL ,"Search")

The result should put a hyperlink in cell H2
If you then click on the resulting link labelled "Search" while you're logged in to your FS account, you'll get the result of a search.

If the right person appears, then you know that the data is already in the database.

MandyShaw1

'If the right person appears, then you know that the data is already in the database.' Well, a person who looks the same is present, in some collection or other, and matching as far as that collection allows, and not currently hiding because someone has edited the relevant index record and come up against the current index editing bug. I would personally suggest you identify the core existing collection(s) holding some or all of this stuff, first, and then add collection filters to the hyperlinked search strings. You can see the syntax if you filter by collection on a random Records search. That would improve your hit quality, I think.