We haven’t been updating the site or the blog for a while and some of you are starting to wonder what happened to the FamilySearch Labs team. Don’t worry, we are still here working on innovative family history technologies. In fact, we offer the following team photo as evidence that we are still here.

(L to R: Joe ‘running man’ Martel, Jason ‘ice cream’ Butterfield, Grant ‘the rock’ Skousen, Dan ‘just Dan’ Lawyer, Judy ‘mini – as in cooper’ Rice)

A couple of posts ago we spoke of some future enhancements to the pedigree viewer. We still intend to add those enhancements but have decided to shift gears for a while and focus on a different part of the experience. We’re calling this next piece of the puzzle a Life Browser. We hope to have the first version available on the site in the next few weeks.

The Life Browser is intended to provide an experience that makes it easy and interesting to share and explore the lives of our family members. While the genealogical details of our ancestors are essential, they often don’t communicate much about who these people were. Genealogical data provides a basic skeleton of someone’s existence and the Life Browser puts meat on the bones.

The basic approach is to help people tell about their relatives through pictures, records, stories, audio, and video. Our hope is to create an experience that makes people want to explore and learn more about their ancestors. If you’ve had similar ideas or have seen good examples of something like this, leave a comment and let us know about it.