www.familysearch.org
FamilySearch released a new feature today that will help us search for their unindexed record sets.
It is called "Explore Historical Images" and is found at https://www.familysearch.org/records/images/
This is the first time they have provided a single place where you can locate historical records that are not yet indexed. In the past some were found on the records search page at FamilySearch and other could only be located by searching in the Family History Library Catalog. Now they are all located in the same search tool. Remember you will be searching by location and record type not by a person's name.
Here are two articles that help explain the feature and how to use it. To view them sign in to FamilySearch. Go to "Help" in the upper right corner of any page and from the drop down choose "Help Center." Copy and paste the title of the article you want into the search box and click search:
How do I use the "Explore Historical Images" feature? (616250)
How to understand your search results in FamilySearch Explore Images? (619640)
Comentarios
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Thanks for the notice. I would like to understand the advantage of searching here vs searching the catalog, which seems to be better structured and easier to navigate. I understand that this a work in progress.
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@Wallace W Carroll - That is a very valid point. There are several things at play here. One is many people don't even know that the newest records uploaded can only be found in the Catalog - and many don't even know the Catalog exists. For those of us - yes, this seems redundant but for many newer users this will be a great new update.
This feature does bring all the unindexed records together in one place with the ability to filter the results in ways the catalog doesn't do things. On thing I really do like with it is that if the film you need has multiple parts - this search will tell you which part of the film to go to. My dad' birth record in Arizona Territory was found in a film with over a dozen parts and the search told me to go to Part 9 which saved me a lot of time.
So like you said above - this is a work in progress and the way we use it to fully utilize it may be revealed over time.
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Thanks. I am happy for your success. Should we hope for a class on this at Rootstech with successful examples like your?
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Ron Tanner announced tonight that this new feature has been released to just 1% of the users of FamilySearch. As they like how it is working they will add more people until everyone has it.
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Is there a way we can request to have it added to our account?
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Probably not. But most of the time, unless major bugs are found and the feature has to be withdrawn and reworked, it is usually rolled out to everyone within a few weeks or so.
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LOVE this feature and think it’ll have great success. Especially for those that are new to searching unindexed records. I work with a number of patrons that struggle with searching the catalogue.
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It was written in something I read yesterday that the key to this tool is the ability to locate the most recently released unindexed records easily. It is currently available to users using Spanish, Japanese, Chinese and Korean. It will be to all soon.
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One benefit of this site vs. the catalog is that images will be published much more quickly to this site than they will be to the catalog. This is part of the new system that FamilySearch is building to help reduce the amount of time it takes to process the images that are being taken and make them available within days rather than months and sometimes years.
Here's a trick for those of you reading this post who don't see the site yet - if you can work out words in Spanish, you can switch your website language to Spanish and then visit the page in the Spanish language. 😃
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I don't get to use it yet! Boohoo! 😥
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