Time is precious. Even the smallest amount of a volunteer's time can make a big impact. But with so many important priorities and demands in our lives, it can be difficult to find time for the causes that are important to us. Get Involved allows you to help others make family history discoveries in ways that are accessible and easy to fit into your day—on your phone or computer, for a few minutes or a few hours, at home or in line at the grocery store. With the many online volunteer experiences available in Get Involved, we hope that dedicated family history volunteers and casual volunteers alike will enjoy the experience.
How Getting Involved on FamilySearch.org Enables Family Discoveries
Get Involved is a FamilySearch hub page—and app—where you can volunteer to help with historical records.
By helping with historical records, we mean the process of digitizing records and making them searchable online. This process allows people to find out more about their ancestors or other family members in those records through a quick search. This accessibility minimizes having to spend hours combing through images of historical records to find the one with a family member's name.
As you explore Get Involved, know that what you see today is only the start of what it will eventually be. So many ways are available to help other people experience the joy of discovering their family stories. Start by looking at the Opportunities page on Get Involved, or download the app. When new opportunities for helping with historical records become available, you'll find them there as well.
Get Involved Tasks
Currently, 4 types of volunteer opportunities are available on the Get Involved Opportunities page:
- Quick Name Review: Quickly check first and last names on historical documents to make sure they were indexed correctly.
- Full Name Review: Make sure that a person's entire name in a historical document was identified and indexed correctly.
- Family Review: Review records indexed by artificial intelligence (AI) to make sure that names, places, events, and family relationships are correct.
- Verify Places: Review place-names in profiles in Family Tree to make sure they follow FamilySearch standards.
To make an activity more meaningful, you can choose from a list of countries. For Quick Name, Full Name, and Family Reviews, you can even request to review records with a specific surname or from a specific place within the country you selected.
How Does Get Involved Work?
Most volunteer tasks on Get Involved involve reviewing names. To illustrate the significance of reviewing names and the role it plays in making records available, we should probably start by talking about how computers and humans work together to speed up the process of digitizing historical records.
Computers and Volunteers Working Together
Indexing is the process by which a historical record—a birth certificate, draft card, marriage certificate, and so on—becomes searchable. In the past, a human volunteer looked at a digital image of the record and then typed the names, dates, and other legible details.
To increase the number of records available for people to search, FamilySearch uses AI to help index records. The computer does a decent job of reading a record and copying the information it contains. But here and there, it makes a mistake—it might misspell a name, for example, or copy a word that isn’t actually a name.
This is where volunteers come in. A human can look at each individual name—or even just the ones the computer flags as needing review—and make sure the computer copied the names correctly. Each name takes only a few seconds to review. If you see a mistake, you correct it. Otherwise, you approve it and move on to the next name.
To see just how easy reviewing names is, watch this quick, 1-minute video!
This activity can be perfect for anyone who has ever felt overwhelmed by trying to read old handwriting. With these types of tasks, the computer has already done most of the tedious work for you—has taken the first try, so to speak, at deciphering the writing. Now all you have to do is help with the trickier names to make sure they were copied correctly.
Get Involved also has you focus on smaller tasks, reviewing one name at a time. Instead of completing and submitting a full project, you can open the Get Involved app and review one name and be done for the day, or you can keep reviewing as many as you would like.
Picking a Name and Location—A Personalized Volunteer Experience
There’s another reason why Get Involved is such a cool volunteer experience. Pick any last name you want—your own, a friend’s, your grandmother’s maiden name—and you can search for it in one of the Get Involved experiences. Then you get to look at any available records related to that name. You can even pick what locations you want to focus your volunteer experience on.
Say your last name is Briceño, for example, and you had ancestors from Colombia. When you begin a Get Involved task, you can enter both the name and location in the search. The computer looks for Colombian records that include that name. If it finds them, you get to help review the document. If not, it points you to a document with the nearest match, and you get to help there instead. (For now, the name-reviewing experiences may start you at the top of the document. If you don’t see the name you’re looking for at first, keep reviewing, and it should appear if the computer found a match.) In the example image below, the person in question is named Juana Briceño.
Can you see why this opportunity is so amazing? Not only are you helping more records in general become available for searching, you are helping with records that could be connected to people from your own family line—ancestors who need discovering and relatives of your extended family.
And here’s another scenario where Get Involved comes in handy. Say you’re doing research on the last name Briceño, but you’re just not finding very many searchable records. In that case, you could use Get Involved as a way to make more records available that mention the name Briceño. The more names you approve, the more records you and other researchers will soon be able to access.
Getting Help
Help is always available for Get Involved activities. While doing an activity, you may see links or buttons that lead to more information.
The FamilySearch Help and Learning Center has articles on Get Involved projects:
- What is Get Involved?
- Help with Quick Name Review
- Help with Full Name Review
- Help with Family Review
- Help with Verify Places
Give Get Involved a Try!
Thanks for taking a few minutes to learn about Get Involved—the new FamilySearch hub page for finding volunteer experiences that interest you. Every record, every name that you help with, could be the long-awaited discovery that someone else has been searching for.
Try Get Involved on your computer, or download the app, and try it on your phone. You can start reviewing names right away. Check out the dashboard that tracks your contributions, and see how much fun it is to help others. Then be on the lookout for new projects to come!
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