Recently you may have noticed a rather important change to the FamilySearch homepage: a new tab titled Get Involved that leads to virtual volunteer opportunities.
Meanwhile, experienced indexers might be wondering what happened to the tab titled Indexing. Don’t worry—indexing definitely hasn’t disappeared, and we still have plenty of indexing projects—but you probably have some questions. Let’s take a moment to answer them.
What Is Get Involved, and Why Should I Click It?
Get Involved is a new FamilySearch hub page—and app—where you can volunteer to help with historical records. By helping with historical records, we mean:
- Indexing
- Reviewing names (a new volunteer experience that we’ll explain later in this article)
- Similar tasks that likewise make the names and dates on old documents easier to find. (These extra activities may not be available immediately, but we’re looking forward to adding more in the future.)
In short, Get Involved is the place to go if you want to take a few minutes and help someone else—even if you only have a minute to spare. You can devote more than that, but with Get Involved it only takes a few minutes to do something significant that will help someone else: a friend, family member, or complete stranger. With Get Involved, you never know for sure who you’ll end up helping, but you’ll be able to focus your volunteering on names and places you are interested in—and make a big impact while you’re at it!
As you explore Get Involved, know that the page is brand new and that what you see today is only the start of what it will eventually be. There are so many ways to help other people experience the joy of discovering their family stories. When new activities become available, this is where you’ll find them.
Where Do I Find FamilySearch Indexing?
To get to indexing as you’ve previously participated in it, just click Get Involved in the FamilySearch header, and then from the drop-down menu click Indexing.
You can also access indexing from the Get Involved tab by clicking My Opportunities. One of the first opportunities available is to index or try a guided tour of indexing—something we highly recommend to anyone who wants to give it a try.
Get Involved was created to allow volunteers to help in the ways that are the most accessible and interesting to them—on their phone or computer, for a few minutes or a few hours, indexing a particular project or reviewing surnames they’re interested in. With all of it wrapped up together in Get Involved, we hope that dedicated indexers and new volunteers alike will enjoy the experience.
What Does It Mean to Review a Name?
The most exciting feature currently available through Get Involved is, without a doubt, the new activity titled Review Names.
To understand the significance of Review Names and the role it plays in making records available, we should probably start by talking about indexing and how computers and humans are working together to speed up the process of indexing historical records.
Indexing Makes Records Searchable
Indexing is the process by which a historical record—a birth certificate, draft card, marriage certificate, etc.—becomes searchable. In most indexing situations, a human volunteer looks at the digital image of record and then enters (types) the names, dates, and other legible details.
Computers and Volunteers Working Together
In order to increase the number of records available for people to search, FamilySearch has started using artificial intelligence to help index records. The computer does a decent job of reading a record and copying the information it contains. But here and there it makes a mistake—it might misspell a name, for example, or copy a word that isn’t actually a name.
This is where volunteers come in. A human being can look at each individual name—or even just the ones the computer flags as needing review—and make sure the computer copied the names correctly. Each name takes only a few seconds to review. If you see a mistake, you correct it. Otherwise, you approve it, and move on to the next name.
To see just how easy Review Names is, watch this quick, 1-minute video!
This can be the perfect activity for anyone who’s struggled with the details of a full indexing project, or who’s ever felt overwhelmed by trying to read old handwriting. With Review Names, the computer has already done most of the tedious work for you—taken the first try, so to speak, at deciphering the writing. Now all you have to do is help with the trickier names to make sure they were copied correctly.
Review Names also has you focus on smaller tasks, reviewing one name at a time. Instead of completing and submitting a full project, with Review Names you can open the app and review one name and be done for the day—or keep reviewing as much as you like.
Some historical records are harder for a computer to read than others. This is why FamilySearch appreciates contributions from both those who can continue to index records from scratch and any who are willing to pop in and review names already indexed by a computer.
Picking a Name and Location—A Personalized Volunteer Experience
There’s another reason why Review Names is such a cool volunteer experience: Pick any last name you want—your own, a friend’s, your grandmother’s maiden name—and you can search for it in the Review Names experience. Then you get to look at any available records related to that name. You can even pick what locations you want to focus your volunteer experience on.
Say your last name is Briceño, for example, and you had ancestors from Colombia. At the beginning of the Review Names activity, you can enter both the name and location in the Review Names search. The computer looks for Colombian records where that name appears. If it finds them, you get to help review the document. If not, it points you to a document with the nearest match, and you get to help there instead. (For now, the Review Names experience may start you at the top of the document. If you don’t see the name you’re looking for at first, keep reviewing and it should appear if the computer found a match.) In the example image below, the person in question is named Juana Briceño:
Can you see why this is such an amazing indexing opportunity? Not only are you helping more records in general become available for searching, you’re helping with records that could be connected to people from your own family line: ancestors who need discovering and relatives of your extended family, who are possibly looking for their own ancestors as well.
And here’s another scenario where Review Names comes in handy. Say you’re doing research on the last name Briceño, but you’re just not finding very many searchable records. In that case, you could use Review Names as a way to make more records available that mention the name Briceño. The more names you approve, the more records you and other researchers will soon be able to access.
Next Time You Have a Few Minutes, Try Get Involved
Thanks for taking a few minutes to learn about Get Involved—the new FamilySearch hub page for finding volunteer experiences that interest you. Every record, every name that you help with could be the long-awaited discovery that someone else has been searching for.
Try Get Involved on your computer, or download the app and try it on your phone. You can start indexing and reviewing names right away. Check out the dashboard that tracks your contributions and see how much fun it is helping others. Then be on the lookout for new activities to come!
