FamilySearch Get Involved

Feels like I’m doing something valuable with my free time! I also love that it shows the path of your contribution, like how you help index a name and someone attached it to a person and took that name to the temple, which temple, etc. So meaningful. Improvements: I feel that each document zooms in too close to the name so you can’t even see the full name, making you pinch out to make sure you’re not missing a middle or first name when confirming. I also think there should be a way to flag that it’s an incorrect highlight and fix it, or marking that “Auckland Australia” is not a person without having it automatically skip to the next document because the rest of the document is a person, or mark that the computer skipped a first name and only highlighted the first and last name. Hope that all makes sense and can lead to app improvements.

I love the opportunity to help review names, and the convenience of being able to use my iPhone to help family history progress! I can review names when waiting in line at the store or when I have a few minutes to spare. Easy. There are several bugs in this app; but perhaps the worst is a newer bug that name swaps. When you click, “Incorrect Highlight” or hit the “Back” button, the contents of the text box gets stuck on the last name you reported as “Incorrect Highlight”, or approved as a “Match”. This can be corrected by clicking “Unsure”, but it took some experimenting to figure out. A glitch that has been a problem for awhile is the thermometer/counter, which doesn’t work regularly once you get past about 300k names. I have been stuck at under 400K for several months, and easily done 2 million or more names. Please provide an update to this app. You’ve started such a wonderful thing. Thank you!

Pros: This is a great, easy to use app! It helps me stay off YouTube/TikTok/news sites and encourages me to do something valuable in a short amount of time. I probably log about 100 names on average throughout each day, often in small small amounts. Con: The app isn’t as reliable as I’d like it to be. When I open it up and tap “Review Names”, about 2/5 times I’ll get a message saying “An error occurred. Please try again later.” I leave the filters as broad as possible to see if that helps, but it usually doesn’t. (This is for the regular search button and the 1950 census button). For a person like me that has a passion for indexing and family history, it isn’t too much of a bother, but I imagine it could turn off a lot of users if they encounter this as frequently as I do.