The following is excerpted from LDS Living. To read the full article, CLICK HERE.
The intersection between FamilySearch and today’s digital age has made for some incredible advances and opportunities to discover our ancestors. FamilySearch has enjoyed a massive surge in the availability of digitized historical documents, and artificial intelligence may just be the key to indexing them all.
Since the 1940s, FamilySearch has sent people with cameras across the world to capture and preserve historical documents such as old church register books or censuses. FamilySearch senior product manager John Alexander told Deseret News that now they have more historical documents than they can keep up with.
“Here’s the problem that we’ve been having: in order for those images to be useful and accessible for people to find their families on them, they need to be indexed,” he said.
Only about 20% of the documents FamilySearch has access to today have been indexed. And while more than 2.6 billion historical resources have been indexed and are usable, more than 5 billion additional documents are still waiting. And new documents are being added to that waiting list at a historically high rate: roughly 1 to 2 million more are added every day.
To read the full article, CLICK HERE.
