570 Million New Hints added to FamilySearch Family Tree

According to a recent blog post by Robert Kehrer entitled, "FamilySearch Releases 570 Million New Hints Between Family Tree and Records" FamilySearch announced the following:

On Thursday, Jan 22nd FamilySearch began displaying 570 million additional historical record hints for ancestors in Family Tree. With this release, over 120 million Family Tree ancestors, with no attached sources, now have potential records to document their vital information. A significant percentage of these records also reference new family members previously not identified but who can be added to Family Tree relationships.

Record hints appear on the Detail page of each of the individuals who may have such hints available. Here is a screenshot showing a link to hints for one of my ancestors:

If you go to a Descendancy view of your ancestors, you will see all of the Record Hints displayed. Here is a screenshot of my Great-grandfather Henry Martin Tanner's family and the Record Hints now available. 

The brown icons indicate Record Hints. Clicking on the icons gives a link to the record. Be sure and review the record before attaching it to your ancestor to make sure the right person has been identified. I do find that the hints are quite accurate and very helpful in adding sources to each individual in your ancestry.

Robert Kehrer goes on in the FamilySearch blog post to state:

FamilySearch hinting builds a cloud of data around an ancestor in Family Tree using all the information from the ancestor and their parents, spouse and children. It then compares that cloud of data to the data indexed on over 5 billion FamilySearch historical records and returns records for a person that displays a high confidence of being the same as the Family Tree ancestor. Current accuracy has been verified at better than 98%.

 This is very impressive and is now on par with MyHeritage.com's Record Matches. These new technologies are a boon to all those who take advantage of having their family trees in these online programs. 

Here is a concluding quote from Bob Kehrer at FamilySearch:

Since its release last summer, the simplicity of hinting, coupled with the side-by-side data comparison, has opened up opportunities for new researchers to contribute valid genealogical information and add new ancestors to the Family Tree based on actual historical records. Because of how hinting works it is not uncommon for it to identify and present records that would have been very difficult to locate through other means. 

Users are currently attaching hundreds of thousands of new record sources to Family Tree ancestors each day and these new 570 million hints are expected to dramatically increase those numbers. These record hints has resulted in the Family Tree becoming one of the largest and most accurate genealogical trees anywhere. 

We invite everyone to visit to FamilySearch and see records you may have never seen about your ancestors, find a new ancestor in records to add to your tree, and if you are experienced with genealogy, reach out and share your excitement and skills with family and friends who have yet to discover the joy of getting to know their past.