Recently compiled, a new data catalog has been uploaded for use in Standard Finder.  Incorporated into this catalog are extensive jurisdictional additions for European and African countries, as well as United States County areas.  As it continues to develop and expand, your comments are welcomed and help influence priority.

After an almost 4 year hiatus, we are proud to announce the publish of a new Standards data catalog for your use on Standard Finder.  It incorporates many years of correction to the existing data which many of you have so diligently emailed us about, as well as expanded and new gazetteers for better global coverage.  As always, it’s not perfect, but has made tremendous advancement.  Please continue to send us your comments as our goal is to continually improve the data and increase the publish frequency to a quarterly basis moving forward.

In order to provide greater visual access to information in the Family History Library Catalog, geographically driven tools have been created to “plug” into the Google Earth, Google Maps, and ArcReader applications.  You can read all applicable instructions, and download these plug-ins by clicking on the “Resources” tab on the Standard Finder tool in FamilySearch Labs.

These plug-ins allow you to navigate by clicking through maps or searching based on approximate addresses to view all the information the Family History Library Catalog has in its records regarding a specific county location.  For example, after I install the Google Earth plug-in, and if I enter in Fort Wayne, Indiana in the “Fly to” search field, it will zoom into Allen County, where Fort Wayne is located. If I click on the Allen County icon, it will show a bubble which I can then click and see all of the records which the Family History Library Catalog has on Allen County, Indiana.

These wonderful tools are being expanded for additional countries, so keep watching as they are added to assist in your continuing research.

We have just put up an update to Standard Finder in labs. The update has the following two fixes (that were reported by replying patrons – thanks!!):

 - If you enter a place that does not exist currently in our catalog we would generate an error. Now we will be much more friendly and just tell you we could not find anything.

- When you looked at variations there was not a separation between the first and second value. Now we have corrected that and put a comma between the two.

 Thanks for your replies. Keep them coming. Other items, such as catalog updates are in the works, but they generally will take longer before they are back into the system.

 Thanks,

Ron

We’ve added another project to the lab – a standard finder! Ok, so most of you are wondering what in the world a standard finder is. Well have you ever wondered how computers determine that a person you’re looking for may be the same as another person? It goes through a match process. One of the key ways of determining whether two possible candidate persons match with each other is to evaluate the genealogical data known about the person. Of course it gets kind of tricky. How does the computer know that Polly Pay is a pretty good match to Mary Pay? How does it know how to compare dates on different calendaring systems or just interpret 24 Jul 1847 and 7/24/1847? How does it know that SLC, UT is the same place as Salt Lake City, Salt Lake, Utah, USA? The computer first takes these bits of data and finds their standard form. For example, it uses a standard finder to determine that Polly is a common nickname for Mary and matches them. In the world of genealogy, being able to determine a standard form of things like places, names, and dates is critical to being able to match things together.

The Standard Finder is what we are currently using as part of the new FamilySearch system. Try it out and see how different names, dates, and places standardize. Use the feedback link in the Standard Finder to tell us what you think.