I am curious - HOW many total hints on Family Search
Next Question - How many hints are already attached to a person?
Another question - OR how many hints are NOT attached to a person?
Answers
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Hints are not attached to a person.
The system will give you a hint when it finds a record (birth, marriage, death, census, etc.) that MAY reference the person in question. It is up to you to decide if that is indeed the case. If it does you then attach the record as a source for some detail about that person (the date they were born, where they lived on a specific date, etc.).
On the person's 'Details' page the number of sources that are attached is show both at the top of the page and further down on the right hand side (on the website, the app may be different). These attached sources may, or may not, have come from 'Hints'. They may have come from users doing their own research.
Or, is that your question? How many of the attached sources were prompted by hints?
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mod note: This discussion has been moved from the General Questions category to the Family Tree category.
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I am not talking about a person's hints. I am talking about overall hints in the system already attached to anyone.
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@debbehagner1 There is not really such a thing as a hint attached to a person. A source can be attached to a person. That source may have originated as a hint or may have been attached in a variety of other ways. Even if it started out as a record hint, once it is attached, it is no longer a record hint — it is simply an attached source, and there is nothing to distinguish such an attached source from one that originated in some other way. And even if it was attached as a record hint, detaching it may or may not cause it to reappear as a record hint.
I suppose it's conceivable that FamilySearch may have logged how many record hints were attached, but I doubt that such a number is kept up to date. The whole concept of record hints is quite dynamic. Record hints may come and go as details on a person's profile (including relationships) change. Changes in record metadata can also make hints come or go. Also, a source record might be attached to a person through some other means, which causes the record hint to go away, even though it wasn't attached via its former status as a record hint.
So although your curiosity is understandable, I don't believe your question about attached hints can be answered. The number of current hints is probably something that FamilySearch could answer, but since it changes all the time, I don't know that it is something that they would make the effort to publish.
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To illustrate why such a count doesn't exist, and would be meaningless if it did:
I was cleaning up a group of legacy duplicates yesterday, and attaching the originating index entries as I went. There was one indexed baptism that came and went from the hints panel on the father, because it had been misindexed (and therefore entered on FS's prior system) as father = Terez (a feminine name) instead of the correct Ferencz (a masculine name). Luckily, I could "retrieve" the hint from the mother's profile, but if it had disappeared from there, too, I could have searched for the record myself and attached it without the hint. (In fact, I should at some point page through the images, to see if there are any more kids who were too badly misindexed for either me or the hinting system to recognize the index entries.)
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It's not really relevant to the topic of counting record hints, but I have a pretty good idea of why that one hint came and went. Since I don't know whether the person in question spoke German or Hungarian at home, I don't know if he went by Franz or Ferencz, so I chose as my "survivor" a profile that had his name in Latin: Franciscus. The hinting system "recognized" the similarity between Terez and Ferencz, but not between Terez and Franciscus, so the hint went away once I merged away all of the profiles based on 1840s baptisms (where the register was patriotically in Hungarian, and hence had Ferencz for the father).
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Currently (when this fact page was updated in April 2024), there were 3.18 Billions Sources in the Family Tree.1 -
@debbehagner1 stated: "I am talking about overall hints in the system already attached to anyone"
I don't know if this is the type of information you are looking for but to give you some indication of the status of attached vs unattached hints, you can do this kind of analysis.
Hints are just pointers to historical record collection entries. One I work with a lot is the Norway Church Books, 1815-1930 database. It contains 14,405, 452 records which will all be put as hints eventually.
Searching the database makes me put in at least some information so I searched using just the county of Hordaland. This brought up 1,947,066 records so very roughly 10% of the database. Looking at the first hundred results, five have been attached as sources. Looking at the last hundred, four have been attached. Filtering for just births, 26 of the first hundred been attached. So, again very roughly, probably about 15% of the collection has been attached. If this is representative of the entire database, then for this one collection:
About 2,160,813 hints have been attached
About 12,244,639 hints still need to be attached.
FamilySearch currently has 3,349 record collections of various sizes. There is a lot of work to be done.
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