The National Genealogical Conference in Salt Lake just finished, and I had the privilege
of attending. I was mostly in the USGENWEB booth, but got to attend several classes and
to roam the exhibitors floor to see the new stuff coming out. I was BLOWN AWAY.
One of the exciting announcements was that FamilySearch has just released 300 million new
records from a bunch of sources. And I was pleased to see that 300 thousand of them were
from Idaho Records - births, marriages, deaths and burials. Links to the search pages for
those new records are now online at our state website. See and use them at:
http://idgenweb.org/idgenweb_main_records.php.
These are records that were produced by FamilySearch Indexing. If you aren't one of
the 300,000 individuals now participating and you have a little time available, check it
out at:
http://indexing.familysearch.org/.
With me at the conference was Joy Fisher, coordinator of The USGENWEB Archives Project.
We had some very interesting conversations with the FamilySearch technical team that
should eventually lead to our access to the API that will allow directly connecting to
data at FamilySearch about specific localities.
I also had a conversation with the individual responsible for the new FamilySearch Wiki
that provides research assistance. They are about to make a significant effort to improve
their Idaho section of the Wiki and will allow me to make available at IDGENWEB any new
information made available there at the Wiki. Two of the team members are Blaine Bake,
head of the Archives at BYU-Idaho (he was the driving force behind their Western States
Marriage Index) and Jimmy Parker, a former head of the Salt Lake Family History Library
and an expert on Idaho research and American Indian research. I'm really looking
forward to the better expert information about Idaho research that will result from that
project. You can see the Idaho portion of the research Wiki at:
https://wiki.familysearch.org/en/Idaho
By the way, we had a great many appreciative visitors at our booth who expressed their
gratitude for the work you all are doing.
Mike St. Clair
Idaho State Coordinator