Projects
Automated Indexing
We currently have a grant from the NSF to develop tools to automatically index historical records. We are focused on US Census records but the tools we are developing will allow us to automatically index records from many different countries (including Mexico). We've also created a new way to index, called reverse indexing. You can try it out at indexing.fhtl.byu.edu, and the key innovation is that you just mark the ones that shouldn’t be there and then hit submit to index the whole batch at once. Currently, we can narrow the correct name to a small set of options and the indexing app will allow us to improve our hand-writing recognition until it is able to match the accuracy of a human.
African-American Families Project
We have been working to dramatically improve the coverage of African Americans on the Family Tree as a way to create new discovery experiences. We used an automated tool to add over six million African Americans to the Family Tree as family unity using data from the 1900 and 1910 US Census. We have been working with volunteers to connect these individuals to their extended family members using record hints and public member trees on other websites. The best way to help with this project is to invite African Americans in each of our communities to set up a free FamilySearch account and add in what they know about their family. They will likely quickly connect with some of the families that we have added to the Family Tree.
Census Tree Project
We are creating a Census Tree that will link the 217 million people that lived in the United States between 1850 and 1940 across each of the census records for these years they appear in and connect each person to all of their one-hop relatives (parents, siblings, spouses, and children). The Census Tree will provide the largest longitudinal data set ever created in the United States and will open up many opportunities for research in economics, demography, sociology, and public health.
Helping Converts Find 100 Names
Our goal is to expand the tree enough that any person can easily find over 100 of their ancestors' names in less than an hour.
Creating Meaningful Museum Experiences
Let's try scanning a QR code.
Take out your phone and open the camera app. Hold your phone in front of the QR code below and wait for a pop-up link.
Click the link and log into your FamilySearch account! After you have logged onto FamilySearch, it will display whether or not you are related to the artist.
Our goal is to implement this activity into museums so all guests can see how they are related to various artists and spread inspiration across generations.
Academic Partner Projects
We have worked on projects for several academic partners. The students in our lab helped Martha Bailey (University of Michigan) with the LIFEM project, Adriana Lleras-Muney (UCLA) and Anna Aizer (Brown) with the Mother’s Pension project, Rick Hornbeck (Chicago) with a project to digitize and index the US manufacturing census, and Ran Abramitzky (Stanford) and Leah Boustan (UCLA) with a project related to Ellis Island oral histories. We will help with any projects that can directly benefit FamilySearch either by improving the Family Tree or expanding their indexed data collections. Our main motivation for these projects is to provide meaningful research experiences to BYU students. Contact Joe Price (joe_price@byu.edu) if you would like the Record Linking Lab to help with a project.
College Project
In previous work, we gathered data on every student who attended Harvard during the early 1900s. We used this data to examine the impact of your college roommate on long-run economic outcomes. We now have funding from the NSF and Russell Sage Foundation to extend this type of data collection to hundreds of colleges covering almost half a century. We are linking this college data with US census records to study differences in access to higher education based on a student’s family background and whether there have been changes over time in the amount of upward mobility created by specific types of colleges.