FamilySearch Clarifies FamilySearch Indexing versus Ancestry’s World Archives

I have written a number of times about FamilySearch's Indexing project. It has been underway for more than a year with more than 100,000 involved volunteers who are presently indexing more than one million records per day.

At the FGS conference last week, The Generations Network/Ancestry.com announced a very similar project. In fact, the new project appears to be almost identical to the FamilySearch Indexing project. You can read the original announcement at http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2008/09/ancestrycom-and.html as well as my reaction at http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2008/09/report-from-the.html. Tim Sullivan, CEO of The Generations Network, also talked about it briefly in a video that is available at http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2008/09/a-video-intervi.html.

In the days since the latest announcement, the genealogy community has had a lot of "buzz" with conversations and comments about the two seemingly competitive projects.

This newsletter's site has many comments at the end of http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2008/09/ancestrycom-and.html. Other online message boards have seen similar questions and comments. I believe lots of information is floating around in e-mail as well.

Now FamilySearch has responded with a written statement clarifying that organization's view of the differences between the two projects. The following was written by FamilySearch:

FamilySearch Indexing is not affiliated with Ancestry’s World Archives indexing program. FamilySearch welcomes the efforts of all institutions and companies that provide more economical access to more genealogical and historically significant records. Following is a summary of what FamilySearch believes are its indexing program’s strengths.

- More quality indexes, faster. FamilySearch already has over 100,000 volunteers indexing about one million names per day. All projects use FamilySearch’s signature process of indexing each record twice and arbitrating discrepancies to ensure the highest possible accuracy.

  - Greater volume and variety of projects. FamilySearch has 15 high speed scanners digitizing 2.4 million rolls of microfilm from its current collection and 200+ digital camera teams filming new records daily in 45+ countries. The result is a greater number and variety of ongoing projects for volunteers.

- Access to more images. Qualified FamilySearch volunteers will have free access to all affiliate images under contract (Footnote.com, WorldVitalRecords.com, Ancestry.com, FindMyPast.com, etc.) with FamilySearch, not just the collections a volunteer personally helped index.

- Greater free public access to images. The general public will have free access to all FamilySearch volunteer-generated indexes through FamilySearch.org. All images that are free of records access restrictions will also be free to the public. All otherwise fee-based or restricted access images with commercial affiliates will be available for free through FamilySearch’s 4,500 family history centers worldwide.

- More partners and language interfaces. FamilySearch has long standing relationships with national, religious, government, and societal archives in over 80 countries and will offer its indexing tool in multiple language interfaces (currently in Spanish and English. Portuguese, German, French, Italian, and Russian are in progress). That means a larger and more diverse volunteer force.

- Established society relationships. FamilySearch has already had great success working with genealogical and historical societies (Ohio, Indiana, Utah, NEHGS, AAGHS, Arkansas, Belgium, Nova Scotia, etc.) in indexing projects while still in its initial phase. It has many more society projects under development and looks forward to many more collaborative efforts with societies in the future.

Comments

[theKiwi]

I loaded up the Ancestry.com World Archives Project onto Windows XP running in Parallels on my Mac Pro last night, and have to say I was quite underwhelmed.

That's probably a biased view because the WAP and Ancestry already had a black mark or two against them by making me have to load it into Windows XP rather than letting me do natively on my Macintosh like FamilySearch Indexing does with their smooth running Java application.

And as noted in the article, the choice of projects was pretty meager too - I ended up with a batch of 10 images of newspaper clippings (5 of them blank - presumably the backs of the cards the clippings had been pasted onto) for a family called Alexander who got married and died in various places around the world, and had their clippings gathered into a collection somewhere.

Yes, for WAP the "lure" of between me and my wife typing 900 names a quarter to get $45 off our Ancestry World account seems nice, but it seems it might be a difficult $45 to come by - firstly I don't have another Windows XP license and another copy of Parallels to install all this onto her iMac. Secondly there seemed to be a lot of clicking involved - it was by no means a keyboard only operation.

I was kind of disappointed that in Dick's interview of Tim Sullivan on RootsTelevision the matter of FamilySearchIndexing.org wasn't raised - either the incredible similarity of the projects, or the fact that it's Windows only - hopefully Tim Sullivan saw as many Macintoshes in the exhibit hall as Dick did and might go away and have a rethink.

Roger

[Alwin]

It should not be an issue of working on this or that platform. If programmers simply wrote to W3C standards this would not be an issue. And if they don't, ask why don't they.

[Ida French]

Dick, I index for FamilySearch and thought I would give Ancestry a try. It took days just to get going. Their first glitch is not recognizing my Ancestry sign in. After going back and forth with e-mail help (which takes a day or two for them to answer) I finally was up and running. Their were three projects to choose from. There is no way to see the next image or previous. I ran into so many problems that I finally quit and went back to indexing for FamilySearch. The developers really need to fix quite a few things before they go any further. There are going to be alot of records that need to be reindexed. Ida

[Kathryn Hermansen]

Roger - If I understand your concern, it seems to be that FamilySearchindexing.org is Windows only? I use a Mac, and have been indexing and arbitrating records, as well as using the pilot search site for some time with no problems.

[Kathryn Hermansen]

Roger - If I understand your concern, it seems to be that FamilySearchindexing.org is Windows only? I use a Mac, and have been indexing and arbitrating records, as well as using the pilot search site for some time with no problems.

[June]

Especially if people who don't know the difference between *their* and *there* are doing the indexing! lol

[theKiwi]

Kathryn my concern is just the opposite - I KNOW that familysearchindexing works on my Macintoshes - I've used it on two of them with no problems. I thought that was clear in what I wrote :-)

Roger

[Sandra J Smith]

I index for familysearch but thought I would give ancestry a try. After a couple of batches, I have now deserted ancestry and returned to familysearch. There is just no comparison - the familysearch indexing procedure is far superior in every way. Ancestry's attempts are feable in comparison.

[Ida]

Sorry June I was in a hurry!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Joy Rich]

Please be polite to each other!