This past Saturday night was the annual Utah Valley Technology and Genealogy Group (UVTAGG) Board Member Christmas Party. Besides having lovely conversations over dinner we had Ron Tanner there to give us a private presentation on what's happening with FamilySearch.
New FamilySearch is being redesigned for it's placement into the www.familysearch.org website. The new design is live but with limited functionality and access. If you currently have access to NFS and an LDS Account Login you can go to http://familysearch.org/invite/familytree_tab and sign up for access to the new design inside of the www.familysearch.org website.
The next time you login to www.familysearch.org you will see a tab at the top for the FamilySearch Family Tree link. We need to start referring to NFS as the FamilySearch Family Tree going forward.
FamilySearch Family Tree is in read only format, but live. You can not edit a person's card but you can view it. The part that you can add to is the sources and discussions. This isn't beta it's the real thing. I love the clean views and easy access to information by scrolling or hovering over the hot spots. You can see some views of the Family Tree below. (Click on images for larger views.)
Pedigree View
Person Card
Pedigree View showing drop down of children. You can also view additional spouses and parents.
You access this view by clicking on "View Ancestor" under the "Person Card" for an individual.
I haven't had a chance to play with sources yet but it looked really good during the demonstration. The big news is all the duplicates have been removed from an individual's file. They will now just link back to the Ancestral File, Pedigree Resource File, IGI, Membership Records, etc. that were all jumbled up inside of NFS. This is a wiki format so it's open edit. Anyone can change anything and we will have a record of the changes to revert back to.
This is a place for your research conclusions so there is only one birth and death field and not a zillion opinions like we had on NFS. The information you see is the summary view for the person on NFS. Currently if you make changes on NFS they will show up in the FamilySearch Family Tree immediately. Eventually NFS will go away.
Once again access to the FamilySearch Family Tree is limited. Ron gave me permission to blog about it and let my readers with a current LDS Account request an invite for access to the Family Tree. We are getting close to a design that will work for world access. They just can't over-whelm the servers letting everyone access at once, besides there's still work to do on it. They have seen 5 times the traffic on the www.familysearch.org website (with it's new design) than the traffic that was on the classic site. The anticipation is huge for the Family Tree so be patient with the roll-out.
Go to http:familysearch.org/invite/familytree_tab to request your invitation now.
See ya tomorrow, for tomorrow is always another genealogy day!
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