Get Involved: How Your Volunteer Efforts Change the World

A brother and sister look together at a phone.

Whether you’re a veteran volunteer or just getting started in discovering your own family tree, Get Involved is the perfect place for you to help with genealogy work on a global scale. Get Involved features online projects for volunteers to review and fix information listed on indexed historical records, ensuring high-quality, accurate information for others to use. With opportunities available on FamilySearch.org and the Get Involved mobile app, it’s easier than ever to volunteer!

Online Volunteers and Artificial Intelligence (AI) Working Together

For decades, volunteers have made it possible for people to answer challenging genealogy questions and uncover the forgotten names of the past. Through extraction, microfiche research, and manual digital indexing, their efforts have made it much easier for others to search for historical records in FamilySearch's databases.

A woman working on her laptop.

More recently, FamilySearch has used artificial intelligence to help online volunteers create searchable records. AI creates the initial indexed record from a historical document, which is then reviewed by volunteers to catch computer-generated mistakes that would make the indexes inaccurate or unmatchable. Through this indexing process, hundreds of millions of new records have been produced in many areas and languages around the world that previously had limited access to historical records online. These records have also become available to people much sooner than before—years before someone would have found the record otherwise. When volunteers and AI work together, genealogy work becomes more effective and efficient—meaning you and others like you can discover more family connections at a faster rate.

More Opportunities with Get Involved

The positive impact of online volunteers on genealogical research and discovery in recent years has been invaluable. In 2022, FamilySearch gained access to the 1950 United States census, and volunteers working on the project through Get Involved were essential in making its more than 151 million names available online.

Get Involved’s opportunities page is filled with other activities for you to try:

  • Quick Name Review: Check the accuracy of a single given name or surname in a historical record. 
  • Full Name Review: Check the accuracy of an entire name—prefixes, given names, surnames, and suffixes—at the same time in a historical record. 
  • Verify Places: Check the accuracy of place information to match the verified place-name format in FamilySearch’s database. 

Each name and place reviewed can help others make breakthroughs in their family tree. Below are only a few of the resources that online volunteers have made possible through Get Involved as of January 2025.

Get Involved OpportunityDates MeasuredTotal Names or Places Reviewed
Quick Name ReviewSeptember 2023–January 2025592,320,985
Verify PlacesOctober 2023–January 20255,212,982
Full Name ReviewNovember 2023–January 202530,360,325

You can click here for an in-depth article about how Get Involved works.

The Difference You Make

Want to see how your individual volunteer work has helped others around the world? The Your Impact feature on Get Involved allows you to see how your volunteer efforts have enabled others to build their family trees!

The more you volunteer, the more your impact page will update to reflect your contributions. The data on the impact page covers the past decade, so you might even see a name you worked on years ago pop up on your page today. Click here for an in-depth article about how the feature works.

FamilySearch's Your Impact landing page

A Big Thank You to All Online Volunteers

On behalf of both FamilySearch and the many people who have found information about their relatives, we would like to thank every volunteer who has ever helped or will help make historical records searchable online. Your dedicated service is highly valued and appreciated.

If you’ve never volunteered with Get Involved before, try it out! We’d love to have your expertise, interest, and attention to detail working alongside us as we strive to make it possible for everyone around the world to connect to their ancestors.

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