Saturday 19 July 2014

FamilySearch redesigns international records collections access

FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org) has been tinkering again with the way that we locate the international records collections. Previously there was a list of defined regions within which the collections were grouped, e.g. "United Kingdom and Ireland", located on the Search page. Now that list has been replaced by an interactive map. Here's a quick walk through...

Visit the Search page at https://familysearch.org/search and scroll to the bottom - this is what you will now find:


Rolling the mouse across the map highlights each region in yellow as you pass over:



If I roll over the British Isles and select Ireland as one of the options in the menu on the left and then click, I now get a brief overview of the number of records held and the number of collections:



To be blunt, that's fairly useless, and I get bored with numbers fairly quickly! What I want to see are the collection titles, and to do this I have to click on the 'Start researching in Ireland' blue hyperlink in the box. Once I click on this I am then taken to a dedicated page listing only the Irish collections:



I suspect this has been necessary due to the number of collections being added - the UK and Ireland page holdings list was getting quite lengthy, and I suspect it was the same for some other regions. There is also the option of using the 'Browse All Published Collections' list beneath the map - but it a very long list...!

Chris

Now available for UK research is the new second edition of the best selling Tracing Your Family History on the Internet: A Guide for Family Historians, whilst my new book British and Irish Newspapers is also now out. And FindmyPast - please reinstate the original Scottish census citations on your new site.

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