As the director of design and engineering for FamilySearch.org for many years, Craig Miller was in charge of overseeing the development of visitor discovery experiences on the website and related mobile apps, including the FamilySearch Family Tree, historical record searches, memories, the wiki, and the volunteer Get Involved feature. Because of his contributions and skilled leadership, a person can confidently say that millions of people all over the world have benefited from his work.
Although Miller's death in July 2025 ended a long career at FamilySearch and left many grieving, we hope this brief spotlight on his career and passion for family history, taken from an interview with Craig in 2022, will continue to inspire many.
As confirmed by numerous heartfelt expressions from colleagues and industry leaders worldwide, Craig Miller loved learning and always seemed undaunted when facing the seemingly impossible mountains that FamilySearch was tasked with climbing as an organization, preparing the way for others to be able to make needed family connections and discoveries with innovative technological solutions.
These innovative solutions include programs and apps that come to life with the click of a mouse or the tap of an icon. They include systems of machines that talk to each other so that anyone with a smartphone can access thousands of pieces of data in the palm of the hand, billions of digitized historical records in multiple languages compiled over centuries from all over the world. They include applications of evolving artificial intelligence to make those records more readily discoverable. All the computers and electronics and everything that makes FamilySearch.org seem to work smoothly and effortlessly (most of the time)—Craig Miller could probably have told a story about each of them.
Speaking of stories, family stories are the things that captivated Craig Miller with family history as a youth and eventually at FamilySearch. At first, he was fascinated by the storytelling that took place at home and in family gatherings, stories told by his parents, grandparents, and siblings, and now extended to other generations. His wife, children, grandchildren, and extended family all enjoyed hearing these family stories and wanted to be in on them!
Growing Up on Family Stories
Hearing and loving family stories from an early age meant developing a great love for his family and ancestors. Craig had vivid childhood memories of his parents hovering over the dining room table, where genealogy materials were spread out. Those memories reminded him how much of his parents' lives were focused on finding, identifying, preserving, and sharing the memories of their ancestors.
"I would look through these things, and I would ask my mom who these people were," he said. "And invariably my mom would tell me a story to make the person real. And so I've always had that as part of me."
One often-told family story was about Craig’s great-grandfather David Liddell Miller, who heard that there was money to be made in the gold mines of Kenya. He and some others made their way to Africa and met with unexpected challenges upon arrival. (Click the button below to check out family history stories about David Liddell Miller's adventures from Scotland to Africa and back and then of moving his family to Canada. It is a great example of how family history ancestor memories can be uploaded to the FamilySearch website and preserved.)
Today, anyone can access an early written account of this true-life adventure of David Liddell Miller, in no small part due to work of his great-grandson Craig Miller.
At all the family gatherings, the Miller family always shared family stories, and the practice continues today. Craig remembered, "Our whole enjoyment was to sit together to hear and share more stories. We all loved them. It was just what we did—the highlight of my background."
Craig Miller, Teen Genealogist
"In those days," Craig Miller mused about his teenage years, "the focus was on finding names and pushing the family pedigree chart out further and then creating family group records for each couple on the pedigree chart. I remember going into the Family History Library and just looking around. It was all so confusing. I didn’t know where to start. I was basically shooting in the dark, trying to figure out where the right records were in the library. I remember thinking even back then, 'You know, we could figure out how to go and find people [in records]—if people understood the system. At the time, it seems like it took about 38 hours in the Family History Library to find a family name. And now I can do that in about a second and a half—I can find an ancestor's name that’s legitimately related to me."
Craig Miller's earlier frustration with trying to find a family name by "shooting in the dark" would eventually lead him to make life-changing connections—a career in technology and later at FamilySearch. As his knowledge about information technology increased over the years following his early Family History Library experiences, he became more aware of how he could apply his expertise to making family history data much easier to access. He began to consider how technological innovation could make genealogical records, family genealogies, and stories more accessible to people interested in tracing their family trees. With that desire also came the vision of how to help people preserve their family stories and memories for the benefit of successive generations.
Programmer, United States Air Force
"I had the opportunity to work on a team that wrote some of the first piece of neural network software for the United States Air Force." Miller shared this information as if in passing. "So I wrote two pieces of proprietary software. The problem to be solved with the Air Force was a signal-recognition thing, and I was able to save them considerable money with the computer recognizing the signal rather than a human-being looking for one." He would give only vague descriptions of what he did for the Air Force, mentioning flight programming, the F-16, and the Minuteman missile.
Following his civilian employment with the Air Force, Craig worked for 12 or 13 years with Novell, a computer networking software company based in Provo, Utah, that, at the time, held a significant place in the worldwide industry market. From that huge corporate setting, he went solo and began a small venture capital business, which he maintained until the opportunity became available for him to explore the possibilities of applying emerging technologies at FamilySearch. He was all in.
How Every Story Becomes a Family Story
Outside of work, Craig Miller spent time remodeling his home, as well as working on projects for his children's homes.
"My wife is really, really big on remodeling our home right now," he said, "but not just that home. I have two sons I'm currently helping, and I'm also helping my brother remodel his home. And so, these days when I'm not at work, I'm doing that. Then I've got my church responsibilities."
Even with all his technical prowess, he's not above pouring cement for his son's driveway. He commented, "I don't enjoy pouring concrete so much, but you know, I can do it. I help out my kids."
"I enjoy being outdoors, hunting and fishing with my kids and my grandkids," he added. "I love sports. I love bicycling! I've got one of the greatest mountain-biking areas just near my house."
The Miller family likes spending time doing the kinds of things that become stories. When the family comes together in whatever configuration that happens to gather, stories get told. Stories get listened to, shared, and shared again. Every activity is a family activity, and when the activity gets talked about, it becomes a family story.
At some point, a family member (or maybe two) will feel impressed to take the time to write down some of these stories. Or maybe they have already done so, either by typing up the stories or retelling them in a voice recording or on video. Some fortunate individuals might discover that they have decades-old video and audio recordings of family members telling their own family stories.
Character Recognition, Artificial Intelligence, Goals
Craig was inspired by the prospects of what emerging artificial intelligence could do and will do in the future to help people make more personal family discoveries. He noted that our digitally oriented lives record almost every event from the trivial to the profound. Until the 1980s, records of all kinds were mostly not digital. Typewriters, even electric ones, created paper documents. Photographic film had to be processed once the film was exposed, whether for still or moving images. All these artifacts—photos, videos, documents, and manuscripts—require digitization to make them more discoverable by others. A handwritten story is the most basic of records, and by its very nature, it can be the most emotionally and historically charged, especially if it is about a family connection.
Once these artifacts are digitized, a computer tries to make sense of the file. The early neural network programing Craig helped create for the United States Air Force some 40 odd years earlier came into play at this point.
"It's artificial intelligence at its finest," he said. "What you do is you train a computer model to recognize things with a bunch of examples. You feed in hundreds of thousands of examples, and then with a neural network model similar to how your brain works, the computer tries to simulate what your brain does and recognizes patterns."
Our whole goal is to be able to help people find their ancestors, to tie families together and bring richness to their lives. That's what keeps me getting up in the morning and coming to work after 19 years—the stories and the binding of families together. That is so, so important.
"Our brains are pattern-recognizing machines," he continued. "Everything around us, we recognize by pattern recognition—any object—a chair, a table, a computer, a book. We even recognize faces that way, right? That's how our brains do that.
"We use a neural network model in a computer to be able to simulate that process. Now, it's not anywhere close to what a brain can do, but it is amazing what what we can do, what we can leverage off of reading and recognizing characters, words, and even relationships."
Miller said that artificial intelligence and character recognition will impact the future speed at which FamilySearch will be able to make more historical, handwritten documents in varying languages more searchable more quickly.
Hints of the Past, Now
Miller commented, "Our whole goal is to be able to help people find their ancestors, to tie families together and bring richness to their lives. That's what keeps me getting up in the morning and coming to work after 19 years—the stories and the binding of families together. That is so, so important."
The FamilySearch site algorithms will continue to process new content, compare it to the family trees of users, and send hints of possible ancestral matches.
Heart Turning Experiences Change Everything
"We were watching a video of somebody using FamilySearch.org for the first time," remembered Miller. "She had never been to the website, had never done any family history. She came to the website and went to our search. She hadn't even logged in but was where you can just put in the name of any ancestor, and it searches everything. Interestingly enough, the first thing that the system brought back was a picture of her own grandfather! She had put in enough information that she actually found a picture of her grandfather that somebody else, a distant cousin, had added.
"As she looked, she said, 'I've never seen that picture before.' And then I noticed there was a little emotion. I saw that heart-turning thing we talk about. It brings forth such an emotion. It just changed everything for her."
