DescendencyExplorer, a new look

https://descend.fhtl.byu.edu/#/login

The Family History Technology Lab at Brigham Young University keeps busy turning out new programs related to family history for members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Of course, those who do not happen to be members are benefited by the programs also, but most of them have a decided Church-oriented theme and are based on the FamilySearch.org Family Tree. The DescendancyExplorer is designed to work specifically with the Family Tree so it is necessary to have your family information in the Family Tree for the program to function. The program is still in the developmental stage and is not yet featured on the Family History Technology Lab's homepage.

The idea of the program is that you sign in to FamilySearch.org and the DescendancyExplorer then does all the work of searching through multiple generations of your family and looks for names of your relatives and ancestors who are ready to take to the temple. Hmm. You say. Isn't this just like a number of other programs that are already available? Well, yes and no. First of all this program does all the work and secondly, it "qualifies" the people it finds. Here is the very simple start page:

Yep, that's it. By the way, when you click on the "Search My Tree" button, you may have to leave the program running for a few hours or overnight before you see any results depending on how complete your previous searches have been. What is different about the program is that it filters out any related people who have no sources attached, who have possible duplicates or who are not completely identified. So the people it finds are "usually" qualified for ordinance work.

I started the program searching while I was writing and it had gathered well over 13,000 records on my portion of the Family Tree without finding even one qualified person. I continued to let the program run and it kept looking. I have had some feedback from others who have used the program and they have found into the hundreds of people needing ordinances.

When the program does find a possible record, it is a good idea to check the "How you are related" link on the person's detail page to see if you are related. I will let the program run until it finishes searching and report back in another post about the results.