FamilySearch released a new volunteer opportunities where we can clean up the
family tree to help us find our families faster, so let's check it out.
Howdy, I'm Caleb Lee with Family History Fanatics and the new volunteer
opportunity that Family Search released is called Improving Place Names. It's a
way to help the algorithm figure out where the ancestors' events happen
where they died, were born, and things like that. So this is available on
both the desktop and the the mobile app version it's right over here and your
menu. I'm gonna do the desktop just because it's a little bit easier a
bit bigger for y'all to see more clearly how to do this. So you're gonna find this
opportunity in this upper box above your recommended tasks. So this page
just gives you a brief overview of what's what you're gonna do here you're
you're gonna see a place of some event in somebody's life then you're
going to standardize it or put it into a format that the algorithm can use to
serve it up to people who are looking for that ancestor. So these ten places
are going to be served up randomly from around the world, so let's just dive in
and see what we can do. This page right in the center, it's got the
thing that we're trying to fix the ED note 88 Noblesville Township, that's the
the place of a residence, and looking at it you can see it's probably a
census, I'll tell you why I know that in a second, but it also gives you links to
the person itself Ruth Anna so you can go and look and try to see that specific
record to get more insight. But another thing that this page gives you that's a
lot easier than going through and trying to find the records and information is
it serves up. There are births and their residents all the life events on their
profile page and this gives you a general idea of where they lived. So in
this case there she's definitely lived in Indiana in the Hamilton Montgomery
area and this helps us narrow down where exactly this place name is so we
can simplify it. Why is this from the census records that ED 88 that's the
enumeration district. Now
that's important data if you know how to use it but family search doesn't search
the enumeration districts they just search for the city or Township and in
the county in this state. So we can see this Noblesville Township it's in, or
Noblesville City, in Hamilton Indiana the United States. So we're gonna put
that Township because we know it's either a Township or a city. Now our work is done
for this case and we're gonna move on to the next person. So this is
another case of where we actually have the same person
where we have extra information that can't be standardized into the
standardized place. So one thing that's a little bit annoying about this is you
get one chance for the it to take this thing to put it in the drop-down menu
before it removes it. So if I click the button it shows me the
drop-down I you know scroll down to look at the residents and such come back here
and dropdowns gone. So you gotta like highlight
hold your left mouse button ctrl C to copy it and then put it back in and now
you have the drop-down menu again. It's just one of the things that you're gonna
deal with when you're doing this. Now sometimes you will find like I
said this is from around the world so you'll get stuff that is from around the
world now with these you want to be very
careful unless you're familiar with the sort of the history and geography of
these places I'd advise not doing it. It looks here like this is a sum of match I
know Czechoslovakia was Slovakia and Czech Republic at some points I
don't know the exact dates again I'm not familiar with Slovakia the history and
such and books like you know this is a Dylan ease style do John Scott strata
but there is we have to consider dates. Because this event happened in
1874 and Dolný Štál - its called Dolný Štál
from 1960 to now. So this isn't the right the Dolný Štál we want to make sure we
have the the name of the place at the time that the thing happened so I don't
know where Dolný Štál was before so I'm just going to hit skip.
It's totally fine to hit skip, because what happens is it takes this
problem the non-standardized placed case and then it serves it up to
somebody else so eventually the Slovakian names will get to somebody who
knows oh of course Dolný Štál. When you're done with
these things it's gonna have a short little ending page where you can you
know click done to go back to the home page or you can keep going, this
stuff only takes a couple minutes. So if you have a lot of time on your hands
I'd recommend doing some of these improving place-name
batches and also going over and doing some indexing batches which we talked
about in that video over there, but the reason I say that is because at the end
of your indexing batches you get confetti on the screen which is much
better than at the end of the these which doesn't give you confetti.
Unless the family tree developers are listening to this in
which case you know what you do now.