The Next Big (Church) Thing.........in genealogy

I hope someone is already looking ahead to The Next Big (Church) Thing in genealogy.
My vote would be for something the Church should be uniquely qualified to do – bring the Henry Ford principles of cooperation and mass production to the genealogy world so that new research can be completed at least 20 times faster, and with much higher quality. For example, by enabling the coordination of all the genealogy work in the nation, the basic genealogy for the entire United States could easily be done in a year, and that would include nearly all the nation’s source records being entered and linked together to form a well-documented national pedigree. This desirable goal is extremely unlikely to happen without a central organization supplying the necessary enabling software and administration, which the Church could easily supply. This project should also bring the Church very favorable press coverage.

Calculations: If 10 million US genealogists each put in 10 hours on this project in one year, that would reach a total of 100 million hours. That allows time to enter and interrelate 10 public records for each individual. Those individual records might include 6 census records, plus a birth, marriage, death, and burial record for each person. If 2 minutes are spent on each document, and there are 300 million deceased Americans, that would require 2 minutes * 10 documents * 300 million people = 6,000 million minutes = 100 million hours.

It is important to notice that the 100 million hours needed to do all the US genealogy is about the same amount of effort I estimate it will take to finish the removal of all duplicates in the (750 million name) New Family Search system. The difference is that the Church has only about 1% of the US genealogists. In other words, it could take the Church 100 years to do the same work the entire US genealogy corps could do in one year.

As a matter of priorities, it would make sense to put the Church anti-duplication project on the back burner for a time while the Church assisted the completion of a very high quality, heavily sourced genealogy for the entire US, including all the US ancestors of Church members.

It would then be possible to go back with this very high quality database and use it as the framework on which to consolidate the temple ordinance data, and as a reference file to resolve any issues of missing or conflicting data. The large number of original sources in the new data should help quickly resolve any questions about current Church data, which normally has no such source citations. This lack of citations and links to source records in Church data leaves open the possibility that there can be many unresolvable data disputes among members who share a common ancestor. The current Church ordinance data will probably overlap only a part of the entire nation’s genealogy, but for that portion, the Church data and the broader database of the US could reinforce each other.

(I have already tested computer programs to handle what I consider the important aspects of such a nationwide project).

Isn't the Church already doing this with "FamilySearch Indexing" project?

Check out http://www.familysearchindexing.org/en/index.jsp. I have volunteered to do several batches of census and death records. How does your idea differ from that?

Tom

Don’t get me wrong, the "FamilySearch Indexing" project is a good project, as far as it goes. It is a great place to start. But from my viewpoint, creating an index to source documents is a far cry from setting the much more aggressive goal of actually having a national program to integrate those records into the finished, lineage-linked database of nationwide scope that I would like to see. That more aggressive goal would require different central software than I see available (or planned) anywhere. Someone would need to offer the appropriate central system for everyone in the US to use, not just LDS members. As it is, people might use Church online image data and the new indexes to put something together on their home computers, but their lack of a much more thorough-going system of cooperation means they would continue to be quite isolated and inefficient and would probably repeatedly do the same research over and over again, as in the past.

Maybe the Church has some worry about going the next steps to sponsor such a useful project, but it is hard for me to see a downside to it. I expect this important add-on could be done for a small fraction of what has already been invested in Church genealogy systems, especially since much work done already could be adapted for reuse in this new setting.

Your idea is a very interesting one. In case the Church doesn't choose to do something like this, I wonder whether there might be some other organization that might be interested in sponsoring it. Have you bounced the idea off some genealogical societies?

I wonder whether the two minutes per source record might be too low. Still, even if it took five or more minutes per record, a project like you suggest could potentially still do a lot of good.

While lurking in Usenet newsgroup soc.genealogy.computing, I have seen discussion of ambiguity. I recall reading a posting that described a situation where the researcher could not determine which of two or three people of similar ages with similar names in the same town or area was the true parent of the ancestor in question. This poster said such ambiguous situations are fairly common, even with full access to public documents. I think I see a possible advantage in such cases for the current approach of each person researching his or her own lines. The family researcher could have access to journals or other non-public documents that could likely resolve the ambiguity, while a project like you propose would not have access to non-public documents. What are your thoughts on that?

At times, I have toyed with a similar idea to what you're proposing. If the existing original source records could be digitized, indexed, and made searchable online, I wonder whether software could automate the searching of source records and building of family trees. At least the easy part of the search process seems to be based on some fairly simple rules. For example, if you have a marriage record, check for matching data in birth records, census records, etc. If a record is found that is a good enough match, and if the match is unique, then follow similar rules from that record to the next level of records. The software would be rule-based for making the leap from one record to the next. Expert system technology or fuzzy logic might be applicable. At least for easy cases, I sometimes toy with the idea that software like this could build a substantial pedigree in a few minutes. How's that for a crazy idea?

Tom, thanks for the post. Was not aware of the indexing project.

I'd start off by saying that Record Search has not yet been added to nFS. Once that's been done, then maybe the infrastructure will be there to do something on the scale you're talking about.

Right now nFS only has Family Tree - a compilation of submissions. But Record Search will be adding the sources from the indexing project. There is thought about linking the two, but it's unclear just how that would be.

rmrichesjr:

Not such a crazy idea, I think. I will say more below. I also think that the appropriate new central system ought to be able to handle at least 5 different data assembly methods all at once, in parallel. (I will only address two here). The results produced by each method could later be cross-checked for differences and clues to solve problems. All methods could share the one general pool of raw data -- the source records and their indexes -- and each method could add whatever other data was available and seemed useful (existing PAF files, for example).

I want to emphasize again what a huge difference in the level of excitement and participation of the genealogy community I think it would make to announce this aggressive goal and project, while providing the software to actually do it. There is very little reason to attempt anything unusual if you know there is essentially no chance that anything good will come of it. But if people see that a process is working well and exceptionally efficiently, and the goal is in sight, then thousands will want to join in and claim part of the credit for the victory, and get some of the spoils -- the high quality finished lineage-linked data produced. I think it really could all be done in a year or two, even if it takes 5 or 10 times as much labor as my estimate.

Descendent-sequence research
My favorite method is not one usually heard about, but it could make a great deal of sense in the context of this large project. I believe that the ambiguity everybody struggles with is mostly NOT inherent in the data we have access to, but rather is mostly a consequence of how we choose to do things. If we insist on always doing pedigree-sequence research, then we will be endlessly mired in these ambiguity issues. This makes our typical pedigree-sequence research by far the least efficient method, in an overall sense, when compared to descendent-sequence research.

(If we working solely on our own then we care very little about overall efficiency, but if we are doing a big cooperative project, then the overall efficiency becomes very important, and we might be happy to change our methods to optimize that overall efficiency, since we all win by doing so. Gains of at least a 20-times improvement (2000%) in efficiency are possible through cooperation, so we ought to be willing to take a look, and maybe change our practices a bit.)

With pedigree-sequence research, the pattern is to try to find a whole series of needles in haystacks. Often, at each generation we jump backwards in our search, we are trying to find one or two people in a new set of public records, in a new location, perhaps with the records in a new and different language. Thus we may be endlessly faced with enormous learning curves for nearly every new person we seek. There is no serious chance for specialization (and its accompanying efficiency), and we tend to see only daunting new technical issues to solve at almost every jump.

Compare this with the mass-production and mass-cooperation methods of a descendent sequence method. Usually, I believe, if you start with a head of family (using his single surname to help limit most record searches), it is relatively easy to find his children, and then their children, and so on. Typically, you will be able to mine one set of public records for hundreds of related people. The family may stay in one place for generations, perhaps move once, and then stay in that new place again for generations. So huge blocks of names might be quickly and accurately interrelated, with very minimal occurrences of ambiguity. Almost every new name comes along with its own full family context, so there is little doubt who is connected to whom. A pedigree-sequence researcher may jump into an area and find there are some similar and confusing names in that general area, and so encounter ambiguity, but the descendent-sequence researcher will probably see no ambiguity problems at all, since he is already looking at only one particular local family.

But, you say, I want to know my pedigree, my ancestors, not my distant cousins! That is what everyone is trying to DIRECTLY achieve in their pedigree-sequence research. But here we run into a general economic principle that has never been applied to genealogy research, as far as I know. It is the Adam Smith idea that INDIRECT economic methods are usually the most efficient (and typically involve cooperation). His famous example was of making pins. If one person made one complete pin at a time, doing all the steps himself, it took a certain amount of time – all or a large part of a day for one pin. But if the pin-making were broken into sub-processes, with workers specializing, then the productivity exploded by some huge number. In Adam Smith’s study, the lone worker productivity was between 1 and 20 pins a day, but in an organized, cooperative group the per-worker productivity became “four thousand eight hundred pins in a day” (48,000 pins a day for 10 men). Those are the kind of productivity gains awaiting genealogists, if they will simply agree to cooperate in a large project. I am sticking with my 20-times number for genealogy, but much more is possible.

I hope you can see that historical genealogy research methods have hardly been affected at all by production-line methods. I think it is about time we left behind our cottage industry mindset and caught up with the industrial society. I think we would be absolutely astonished by the results. We would finally have adopted Henry Ford’s insights to organization.

Once masses of accurate, unambiguously connected, descendent-sequence researched, single-surname names, with source record references, are finished for an area, taking full advantage of any special skills developed to be successful with those local records, then these large blocks of many hundred or thousands of highly accurate names can be connected together through the women who move from a birth family to a marriage family. (Some new software features would help in this process). At that point, any needed pedigrees could be instantly traced, going backwards through the sets of interconnected descendent-sequence data.

Your suggested auto-connect method
I think it would be interesting to try your method on a suitable set of data. And it could certainly be a useful utility program to run with any database to help explore the data and resolve certain problems. But I fear that, as a general rule, it would suffer some of the same problems as the current pedigree-sequence research. First, there would typically be no way to predict in advance where the next jump backward might land you within the nation, so there would be a strong pressure to finish ALL data input for the whole nation before serious use of that algorithm could be expected to be very successful. Second, at each jump backward you would likely run into the same unnecessary ambiguities encountered by manual pedigree-sequence research.

One advantage here of the descendent-sequence research and data input is that whole geographical areas could be finished incrementally and checked off. The full access to all possible pedigrees (which you suggest) is still delayed until all the data has been interconnected and all possible manual checking and corroboration completed, but that should be a lot more solid and satisfying work product than relying only on the programmed guesses of a specialized search routine flying through a huge collection of raw data.

We should no longer view genealogy research with despair as an infinite and uncompletable task. Cooperation concepts (and appropriate implementing software) change the mathematics of genealogy research drastically. With the huge efficiencies inherent in the cooperation I suggest, we have plenty of time to do all data interconnections manually and carefully. There is no particular need to find a machine-match-merge solution to completing genealogy work on a national scale.

RussellHltn:

I have spent several hours in demos and at genealogy conferences concerning nFS, and I even tried to do a few things on my own family line using it. I had only limited success because, for example, I could not even record my daughter’s marriage, presumably because of constraints on entering data about her husband, who is obviously not part of my pedigree. I think I can say with confidence that it is already a very complicated collection of rules and code – clever and perhaps even mind-boggling are the words that come to mind. I have worked on some big complex systems, and this certainly appears to already at least match any of those.

I really hope the decision is not made to try to make that one collection of code become “all things to all people,” as I keep hearing from different sources. What I hope is that this big project will be treated something like the Microsoft Office suite of programs. I think there is a very good reason why we have Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Access as separate collections of code, but with the ability to easily translate data from one to the other for different operations. Imagine trying to code, maintain, and extend all those functions in one integrated piece of code, plus maybe stir in Photoshop and Acrobat just for good measure. And then plan to integrate eBay and Amazon in version 2. At some point early in the game logically inconsistent rules and functions start fighting with each other and you can’t even get the result you want.

If the nFS system does three or four important things well, and is optimized to do so, that ought to be good enough. I believe it is intended to be a temple work scheduler (and transmitter of related data to the temples, I assume), a way of checking on duplication of names going to temples, and a means to verify that all past work has been done correctly and thoroughly by merging all past ordinance data for the same person. That sounds like a good place to stop on functions and bells and whistles for one file and menu system.

The collection of rules and code to do the nationwide project as I have described it would need to be based on a very different set of assumptions and features to be optimized for that very different task. Rules that make sense in today’s nFS would probably cripple a system intended to serve a broader audience and a whole new set of data, such as the complete set of US source records in both image and text form. For example, if we have people outside the Church using this system to help create the nationwide database, as I certainly hope, would we keep them from adding in their daughter’s marriage, based on actual marriage source documents, because the husband was not in their list of accessible people? That would make no sense in that setting. There would be no reason to restrain them from entering and connecting data from ANY deceased woman’s marriage, using appropriate source documents.

I hope the choice will be made to put what is being called Record Search into a new framework which will be optimized for nationwide use, not just focused on uniquely LDS data needs, or shoe-horned into the already complex nFS database system. That would allow some exciting things to be done quickly. There would need to be no dependence at all on the current nFS data, since, for non-Church members, most linking of individuals could start with the public source records themselves, not with Church internal data.

As an important extra feature, the fully processed, mature data from the current nFS database might be transferable to the new database in some form that allows and encourages the linking of source records to that data, while leaving behind the long and intricate processing history of much of the nFS data.

huffkw wrote:I have spent several hours in demos and at genealogy conferences concerning nFS, and I even tried to do a few things on my own family line using it. I had only limited success because, for example, I could not even record my daughter’s marriage, presumably because of constraints on entering data about her husband, who is obviously not part of my pedigree.

The rules that constrained you are likely part of compliance with privacy legislation and regulations. To overcome that in any genealogy project would literally take an act of Congress. Therefore that is a poor example of the limitations of nFS.

A better example would be your attempts at working with records that privacy legislation and regulation no longer apply to. To fall outside the reach of privacy laws, the individuals you are working on need to have a birth date more than 95 years in the past if there is an available death date, or a birth date more than 110 years in the past if no death date is available.

huffkw wrote:For example, if we have people outside the Church using this system to help create the nationwide database, as I certainly hope, would we keep them from adding in their daughter’s marriage, based on actual marriage source documents, because the husband was not in their list of accessible people?

Creating any system capable of such error trapping would currently face almost insurmountable opposition from privacy advocates because to them it would be too Orwellian and too . . . um . . . (see Revelation 13:16-17). The potential to abuse such a database would be immense and make the current magnitude of identity theft problems look trivial.

I regret that our current society is too paranoid and too scheming to allow such a database as you envision, regardless of how useful it would be.

jbh001:

I want to assure you that your concerns about privacy are not any reason to fear or resist the good that such a system could do. Every reasonable concern about privacy can be easily handled by the technology.

I am a lawyer and a computer consultant, and I have spent some time on the topic, and as far as I know, there are no general laws in the US governing such situations. It is all a matter of preference, prudence, and being respectful. In a few cases there may be specific private contracts that need to be observed. You can find any number of genealogy websites that contain data about the living, and I don’t know of any legal trouble anyone has had on that point. And how about the new phenomenon of YouTube, Facebook, etc., etc., where the living flaunt their existence and information? I think it is interesting that the US government publishes data about deceased persons almost as soon as they die, so the government is not too concerned about such matters. And our social security numbers are used everywhere by nearly everybody. Privacy is honored only in the breach, as the saying goes.

The privacy issue seems always to be big in genealogy circles, and I guess that makes sense since people and identities are at the heart of the process. It is a good idea to bring it up here.

However, I think there is sometimes an unreasonable level of concern, which I don’t completely understand. Maybe some people have mixed together two quite different things. They might legitimately worry about exposing themselves and others to some kind of improper knowledge and treatment by the public. But I wonder if they also mix in some concerns about ownership and copyright issues. They may feel a pride in their work and want to be recognized and perhaps paid for their strenuous efforts, and feel cheated if people just grab their stuff and do unpredictable things with it. I think the two legitimate issues of privacy and copyright/ownership can be dealt with quite separately.

It would be easy to add security logic to a large database system such as I propose, so that any user who enters data could have complete privacy (and complete ownership), sharing none of his or her work with anyone but themselves, as with a home PAF file, or they might choose to share it online with specific members of their extended family, or they could choose to make some or all of it visible to the public, with constraints against any outsider seeing anyone who is living, for example. They might even elect to charge people to view their data, if they wish.

So in the ways just mentioned, what is seen by the public would be more under the personal control of the data contributor than it is in nFS. With its main focus being on temple work, the nFS is set up as a communal database where any descendent of a specific person can see, change, and add anything about that common ancestor, even if that conflicts with the desires of their many distant cousins who also have that same access to see and modify that common ancestor. For example, ten generations back, a user could have “view and change” access to people with 1,024 different surnames. That means an uninformed and undisciplined person could do a lot of damage, if they chose to. There may be literally millions of descendents of the 1,024 ancestral families who could have their ancestral data messed with. But, of course, users with that access could also do a lot of good that could benefit millions of others by making the right connections and clearing up data errors, and especially, making sure their temple work was done correctly.

I think the nFS has done what it can within its communal data structure to limit access to the proper people who have the right interests, and hopefully, the right data. But, one might still worry that there may still be too much general access for users, who might introduce errors by mistake. It may be fine for concerned and diligent members, but inviting in millions of outsiders, who don’t share our concern about the proper recording of temple work, could open up the system to a host of problems (which could all be guarded against in the system I propose).

Within the new system I suggest, it would be easy to allow people to put in any data they wished, perhaps with a different interpretation of an historical record, and anyone with proper access could see it, but it would not change any data anyone else had put in. That compartmentalization of original data, and any changes to it, might also be considered a security improvement over nFS. Connections could be made between the data entered by different people so that a complete interconnected whole could achieved, but, again, even these connections would not change anyone’s data. Those connections would be another layer of data, stored in a separate place.

I could fix my daughter’s marriage data by logging on as her, and I am sure she and her husband would appreciate my taking care of that for them, but there is something a little strange about having to have a whole list of family logons just to do some ordinary data maintenance for the family. That is not a constraint that would make sense to the generic genealogist wishing to add their data to the whole. For example, they might wish to put in the genealogical history for the entire population of a small German village. (I know one lady who does this sort of thing.) They could not do that at all under current nFS rules. They could only see and modify the one or two people they were directly connected to as a descendent, and I presume they would have to carefully build up their pedigree lines before they could enter those people at all.

I meant to use my daughter’s marriage as an example of constraints that make some sense within the nFS system, which is especially concerned with sealings and other ordinances, but those constraints would have very little to do with real privacy concerns in a more generic system. Those constraints would simply make the system almost unusable as a means for collecting a large amount of high quality, lineage-linked data from many industrious participants.

huffkw wrote:I want to assure you that your concerns about privacy are not any reason to fear or resist the good that such a system could do.

Unfortunately it is not me you need to assure. It is Congress and those that would lobby against such a database.

For example, a family history organization I know of published a book back in the 1950s or 1960s about a certain ancestor and his descendants. Included was birth, death, and marriage information on many living individuals. When that family history organization went to print an updated second edition, the privacy laws that have been exacted since the first edition prevented them from adding information on ANY new descendants. And had those same laws been in effect at the time of the first edition, no information on those living at that time would have been legal to publish (at least not without a written release from every single one of them).

huffkw wrote:You can find any number of genealogy websites that contain data about the living, and I don’t know of any legal trouble anyone has had on that point.

In today's privacy climate, I call that dumb luck.

huffkw wrote:And how about the new phenomenon of YouTube, Facebook, etc., etc., where the living flaunt their existence and information? I think it is interesting that the US government publishes data about deceased persons almost as soon as they die, so the government is not too concerned about such matters.

These are poor examples. It is one thing for me to publish and make my own information available to the general public. It is an entirely different matter for someone else to post that information without my consent or knowledge.

Additionally, once a person is dead, privacy is no longer much of an issue. Even there, it does not trigger an automatic release of all information regarding that individual. For example, the spouse listed on a marriage license may still be alive. Parents listed on a birth certificate might also still be alive.

As a lawyer your statements don't come across someone who is familiar with the ins and outs of all the privacy legislation and regulation relevant to your proposal.

huffkw wrote: The privacy issue seems always to be big in genealogy circles, and I guess that makes sense since people and identities are at the heart of the process. It is a good idea to bring it up here.

However, I think there is sometimes an unreasonable level of concern, which I don’t completely understand.

Privacy issues are the most significant stumbling block your proposal faces. They overshadow the combined effect of any other stumbling block it may face. There is a reason that U.S. census records are searchable only up through 1930, and it's not a technical or manpower issue.

Perhaps I'm missing something, but what in the original proposal by huffkw requires any information about living people? Couldn't the project be done, and most of the benefit from it gained, by working only with dead people, or information old enough to be reasonably confident that the people described in the records are now deceased? What am I missing about the original proposal that requires information about living people?

jbh001:

Hmmm. If you see things that way, then many others probably do also. So I will have to dig a lot deeper to find and present the complete “ground truth” on this complicated point, including following up your Google search results. I have done some privacy research about Europe, but they see things quite differently there.

Usually these privacy laws are directed at governments (might the census records be one such case?), but I cannot say unequivocally right now that the behavior of individuals is not covered in any way.

So let us assume for the moment that everything you say is correct.
What if I said the new system would not be allowed to contain data on living people at all, but only the 300 million deceased Americans?
Would there still be a serious objection to setting up such a system?

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(I have already mentioned that in the system I envision, the living could be in there, if the users chose to enter them, but those living would not be visible to anyone except named family members. I thought that should be good enough for everyone, but I need to be sure. Maybe we are simply dealing here with a lack of confidence that the system can actually maintain privacy for the living, regardless of the elaborate controls embedded in it.)
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I have friends publishing (formally and informally) family books all the time, many with complete basic data on living individuals. No one has had a problem with that, that I know of. They get sold, distributed widely, donated to BYU library, etc. Is there a way I could check the case you mentioned to see the circumstances, and maybe see if there was anything unusual about that case?
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I would like to deal with all objections to such a database, and see if there might be a way to resolve those objections and move ahead. The current ways we have to do research are so inefficient that, as a lifetime computer professional working on very large systems (many, many times larger than the one I suggest for genealogy), I just cringe every time I feel I have to spend much time doing research.

If the objections come down to just resisting change from the old ways, or maybe a fear that some genealogy professionals will be affected economically, temporarily, then I will not be too sympathetic. It is time to move on, I believe.

huffkw wrote:I hope the choice will be made to put what is being called Record Search into a new framework which will be optimized for nationwide use

Perhaps I'm missing something, but isn't the entire premise of this thread dependent on the assumption that all the source records needed for this project are already digitized and indexed? Otherwise the time assumptions given in the opening post on this thread are off by a significant factor.

I don't know what percentage of the needed records are available online, but I'm guessing it's far less than half. The Church is diligently working at digitizing records, and the FamilySearch Indexing project is indexing many records, but there is still a lot of work to do, just in making the records available.

To my mind, it makes a lot of sense to separate the projects, which is what the Church has done. Digitizing is one project, that requires access to records and equipment to scan images. Indexing is another, and the FamilySearch Indexing model is a great innovation in this area. Identifying linkages is another project. This will of course still be plagued by ambiguity -- especially older records have inaccuracies and omissions that make it difficult to decide if you've really got the right John Brown (a very real problem in my ancestry).

In any case, the project envisioned in this thread sounds great for that third project, but it depends very much on the first two.

Alan_Brown wrote: In any case, the project envisioned in this thread sounds great for that third project, but it depends very much on the first two.

I would be perfectly happy if that is how it comes out. I mostly wanted to get my two-cents-worth in before plans and commitments are made concerning that third project. The little bit of speculation I have heard about future plans did not sound all that well thought out, so I hoped my plug for a new kind of cooperation and efficiency might get a hearing. I have spent a lot of time on this topic, looking at it from several different angles in an academic way, and maybe my experiences could be useful to others.

The main thing I think is missing is a general goal and commitment in the genealogy community to create a lineage-linked central database such as I have suggested. I’m sure the resources exist if enough people had the will. Without that goal and the will to do it, even completing the digitizing and indexing would not be enough to make it happen. We would probably still be left with PAF files on home computers, in much the same way and on much the same scale as we have now. We should remember that much of this source record data is already available from other online sources, much of it indexed, so the biggest single change coming from Church involvement might be simply making it free (although I assume the range of data will eventually exceed what is already available).
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I want to add some other viewpoints to what you have said.

I believe there are about 100 million digitized images available at this point. I don’t know how many are indexed, but one person thought that about 300,000 images were being completed each week. (Double-entered, that would be about 600,000 images). At that rate, for 50 weeks, that would be 15 million completed a year. That is a big number, but it still might take 133 years at that rate to do the full 2 billion images. I am an impatient guy, so I am looking for a place to push on the gas pedal.

If it takes 40 minutes per image, that means people are spending about (40 * 600,000/60 = ) 400,000 hours a week on the indexing project. At 4 hours each a week, that would mean 100,000 people are active in the project.

If more people were excited about the project, because the goal was very much in sight, instead of appearing to be more than 100 years off, then we might have 1,000,000 a week contributing or even 10 million a week contributing. (Aren’t there about 1 million people on the old FamilySearch site every day? More of them might want to help if the incentives/enticements were right.)

It would be a positive spiral – the more who are willing to work, the more who would be willing to work. If there were 100 times as many people involved, at 10 million, or the equivalent number of hours, it would only take about one year to index it all – at that speed it might far outpace the digitizing process.
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But we might consider that there are other ways to get the same result. People can still do data entry directly from microfilm, for example, as they have done in the past, and they could then more easily choose which film they want to work on, which presumably would contain data of direct interest to them. That would again raise the immediacy of the payoff to the workers, and encourage them to specialize, and any digitizing bottleneck could be avoided. They might very well choose to go the next step and lineage-link everyone in the records they are dealing with.

This individualized process could cover all three steps at once -- accessing the microfilm, indexing or data conversion, and linking of names.

If the grand goal was in sight, and the software was available to support it, many people might find numerous ways to contribute without waiting for all the Church’s industrial processes to happen in sequence, possibly over a very long period. I was told that large sections of the Church’s microfilm are off limits to indexing (and perhaps digitizing?) because of prior contractual agreements. It may be that individuals would not be constrained by those contracts, if they have other sources of data.

I would like to see the cooperative system in place soon, if for no other reason than to “fire up the base,” as they say in politics, by showing them that the goal is real and its accomplishment can be near at hand. They would not have to wait for their grandchildren to finish the task.

We might also note that this is a one-time task. Once the old public records from the beginning of our nation (and Europe) are done, no one should again have to go back to them. Most future data sources may be available almost immediately, or at least would not go back more than about 80 years. This endless combing of ancient records by so many people could finally mostly cease. (People might still wish to see them, but it would be more like a museum visit than active genealogical research.)

Seems like most of these forum topics, and many blogs, are suggesting a new database, one not built on the nFS data set. Many of the current problems being discussed about the data, research, sourcing, documentation, and living individual information issues in nFS would be resolved if a NEW database of RESEARCH was created, and we didn't dump in all the past info from Ancestral File, Pedigree Resource File, Membership Records, and the IGI.

There seems to be no opposition (but many proponents) to the 2 (or more) databases idea. Is anyone at FamilySearch listening? I hope so, but they seem so dead set on doing it THEIR way, and haven't addressed many of the major concerns presented so far. I'm losing faith in their ability to listen to new ideas.

BradJackman wrote:NEW database of RESEARCH was created, and we didn't dump in all the past info from [...] the IGI.

Except the IGI is strikes at the whole purpose of the church's involvement in Genealogy. It has to be there in some way, shape or form.

I think things will change once Record Search is grafted into nFS. The existing web of AF and PAF will act like a mesh in skin grafting - a framework to speed the work of attaching source-based information.