BRATTLEBORO, Vt. — The next in-person and Zoom meeting of the Windham County Genealogy Interest Group will focus on an exploration of “The New Full Text Search on Family Search” and “Getting Acquainted with the New Interface at Chronicling America,” on Saturday, March 15 from 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. over Zoom and at Brooks Memorial Library. In case of inclement weather, it will be Zoom only.
Please register at this link: bit.ly/WCGIG2025A.
The Zoom link will be sent before the meeting. For those people in the local vicinity, an in-person meeting will also be conducted at Brooks Memorial Library, 224 Main St., Brattleboro, Vermont.
Family Search’s New Full Text Search is designed to significantly streamline the research process by allowing users to search the text contained within images of documents. Whether it’s a handwritten record or a typed document, this tool not only highlights the name being searched, but also provides an automatic transcription of the document. For documents that have not been indexed, Full Search uses advanced recognition technology to pinpoint the exact location of a person’s name within the record, eliminating the need for tedious page-by-page navigation. Users can now find relevant information more quickly and accurately, saving hours of painstaking work. This tool will be especially valuable for those working with unindexed or hard-to-read documents, giving them access to hidden gems that were once too difficult to extract. Full Search is currently available as an experimental tool on FamilySearch, and its development will continue to evolve based on user feedback. Come to the meeting and let’s see what we can discover.
Over the past year, the Library of Congress has been redesigning an interface to the all important Chronicling America. Since 2006 the Chronicling America Historic American Newspapers collection provides access to select digitized newspaper pages produced by the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Library of Congress. The consortium has digitized over 3 million items and made these historical newspapers accessible for searching through 1963. Over the past year, the Library has been redesigning the interface and will be migrating to the new design very shortly. We will explore the changes from the legacy site to the new site, as well as visit Chronicling America: A Guide for Researchers for search tips and how best to use the collection, and a few of the topics in Chronicling America compiled by the librarians at the Library of Congress.
This event is free and open to all. For more information, contact the Windham County Genealogy Interest Group at [email protected].
