What's New at FamilySearch - October 2016



whats-new-on-familysearch-october-2016-find-more-genealogy-blogs-at-familytree-comFamilySearch often adds new things to their vast resources. They also make changes to improve features that are already offered. Every month, they put together a blog post with information about what’s new at FamilySearch.

In October of 2016, FamilySearch made improvements to its Help Center. The new Get Help menu now contains 6 options instead of 14. Those six items are: Visit Help Center, Getting Started, Contact Us, View my Cases, View Research Wiki, and What’s New.

FamilySearch users can now search for help content directly from the Get Help Menu. That search now includes the Learning Center, research Wiki, and knowledge articles. Previously, a FamilySearch user would have to preform all three of those searches separately. It is also possible to click the Help Center option and preform a search from there.

Navigation in the Learning Center has been improved. A panel along the left side of the screen will show other lessons in the series that you are viewing (if it is part of a series). In addition, there is now a list of related lessons that will appear beneath the keyword tags. Click on a lesson title to view it.

FamilySearch added more Record Hints. To help you learn more about your ancestors, Family Tree now contains approximately 141 million new record hints. These new hints come from 86 indexed collections. These new ancestor and record hints came from the updated historical records collections at FamilySearch. Those records include the 1851 and 1881 U.K. Censuses.

FamilySearch made updates and improvements to both its iOS and Android apps. FamilySearch users who have the app can now send a message to another FamilySearch user by tapping on an event’s modified or contributor name. You can also now view Messages in the app drawer. There is a new option to open a map on the places of a person’s events.

New functionality at FamilySearch makes records from the U.S. Genealogy Obituaries collection even more valuable. When an obituary has a text transcript available, FamilySearch now displays it along with the indexed data. If a full transcript is not available, FamilySearch will show you the full text in the image of the obituary.

Related Articles at FamilyTree.com:

* What’s New at FamilySearch – August 2016

* FamilySearch Addend 141 Million New Hints

* New Databases on FamilySearch.org

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