The Hampshire Family Historian | Volume 50 No.1 | June 2023

Local Group Programmes

Many of us are looking into our history in order to hand it on to our grand-children and that requires it to be written up. So, the records of a grandfather who was a gardener at many large houses are being collected and made into a story with illustrations showing his knowledge and wide range of interests. One of our number had relatives who, sadly, spent time at John Groom’s Children's Home at Clacton-on-Sea. There are memories of visits there to their Open Days before and after the buildings were taken over by Barnardo's. As usual a wide range of topics were shared this evening. Forthcoming Meetings:

No details available.

Contact: Margaret on 07824 779037 E-mail: andover@hgs-online.org.uk

Andover Meetings are normally held on the second Thursday, September to July, commencing 7.30p.m. at The Fairground Hall, Weyhill, Andover SP11 0QN

Reports by Richard Backhouse (February) Getting the most from FamilySearch – Sharon Hintze

Sharon is the retired Director of the London Family Search Centre and a very experienced researcher. FamilySearch is a non-profit organisation and website offering free access to genealogical records. It is operated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (a.k.a. the Mormons) in Utah, USA, of which Sharon is a member. Their resources have been available for many years, originally as the IGI (International Genealogy Index). It has clearly come a long way in the last decade or so. As FamilySearch, it now claims to be the largest genealogical resource with over 17 billion records. However, 80% of these records are not indexed and are viewed by scrolling through microfilms as thumbnail images, although all of their 2.4m microfilms have now been digitised. To speed up the necessary indexing workload – and to enable a specific search to be made – they have been using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to replace outsourced human transcribers. They began with the US 1950 census and the process has been very successful with few mistakes being made. Records are best searched by location, rather than the collection name. It is then possible to refine this by several categories – Images, Catalog, Genealogies, Books and Family Tree. The overall message is one of collaboration where members create and share information. You can add your own family tree via a GEDCOM file upload, but after that, anyone can edit it. Sharon says that people in these trees are “their ancestors and not yours”. Records are “neither finished nor right” and it is an ongoing project which forms part of one global

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