Thursday, January 22, 2009

What will GenSeek be?

If I put http://www.genseek.com/ in my browser, I get this web page:


Mark Tucker on his ThinkGenealogy blog did a little sleuthing recently after his interest was tweaked by some tweets by Paul B. Allen on Twitter from the AFFHO conference in New Zealand last week. See Mark's post What is this GenSeek of which you speak?

As smart genea-bloggers do, Mark wondered on his blog:

"I wonder if this has anything to do with an announcement that was made in May 2008 about a partnership between FamilySearch and FamilyLink.com to produce what Paul called, the Family History Library Catalog 2.0. What could be a better “gateway” than a library catalog? Here is a quote from the May 2008 post:

"'The new catalog …may become the single best starting point for family history searches.'”

Sure enough, Paul Allen responded to Mark's speculation with:

"You are absolutely correct. GenSeek.com is the site where we will be launching the Family History Catalog 2.0. Not only will everyone be able to add new sources, and improve the descriptions of existing sources, but we will also be linking to the online versions of all the sources as soon as we (or the community) can create the links.

"The most exciting part of GenSeek was announced in Auckland, but I don’t believe we are ready to announce it to the general public yet. But as soon as we do, you can be sure that I will tweet about it!"

This sounds like it's going to be a wonderful thing. I hope it happens sooner rather than later.

The web page at the top of this post says:

"We will soon be launching a new genealogy service that will revolutionize how you do your genealogy! Please submit your email address and we will inform you when the site launches and keep you posted of our progress.We may also invite you to a private beta before the launch "

You can submit your email address for more information about GenSeek as it comes online.

Excellent work, Mark!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Recall the GeneAward 2008 remark that FamilyLink seems eager to devalue the word "revolutionary" by using it as an adjective for every step they take? Well, according to the GenSeek home page, GenSeek "will revolutionize how you do your genealogy"...
Somebody slow Paul Allen down, please. I cannot handle so many revolutions in so short a time span ;-)