BYU Historic Journals project

If anyone is interested, we've gone public beta with a project at BYU where people can contribute information about the existence/location of their ancestors' journals (and even upload scanned images of journals if they choose), as well as tag who is written about in the journals. When users log in using their new FamilySearch credentials, the site can automatically crawl their ancestry and tell them if any journals by their ancestors have been reported in the system, or if any of their ancestors have been tagged in other people's journals even if the ancestors didn't write their own journals. If you're interested, take a look at

http://journals.byu.edu

We've implemented an invitation system for allowing new users, but I've set it to allow anyone with new FamilySearch account to be able to create an account and won't enforce the "invitation-only" constraints unless it looks like we start growing faster than we can handle without it.

-Doug Kennard

Very, very cool, Doug. Thanks for the announcment.

The sign-in page can cause a bit of confusion. The text instructions above the text group box for the username and password says "Enter your FamilySearch credentials:". I have credentials for both FamilySearch and newFamilySearch so the use of the term FamilySearch in the text group box caused me to enter those credentials. Of course I got an "*** Incorrect username or Password ***" error. For those like me, would you please change the word FamilySearch to newFamilySearch?

Edit: A message with a recommendation to address this discrepancy was sent to the Historic Journals administrators.

Thanks for the suggestion. I have changed it to "new FamilySearch" to avoid confusion.

What relationship, if any, will this site have with BYU's Harold B. Lee Library collections of journals and family histories? I have uploaded two different 250-page family histories as PDF files to that site. Is there (or will there be) any tie-in, or will they remain separate?

Sorry for the late response, I just now saw your message.

There is currently no formal tie-in between the two sites, but users of the Historic Journals site can add references to journals/histories/etc. in external collections (including the HBLL collections).

For example, for "Remember Who You Are : The Life Stories of Love Clayton and Elizabeth Bitner Dunford and their Forebears," you could add reference information that says it is found online as a part of the Family History Archive and include the URL for the online version so people can easily get to it. You could then add tags with the (new FamilySearch) PersonIDs of the people the book is about. Then, if any descendants of those people search for things about their ancestors on the Historic Journals site, that book will show up in the search results, and they can follow the link to go directly to the book on the HBLL site where it is available.

-Doug