Issue 47.14
Jim Greene, an employee of FamilySearch, announced November 10, 2014 the retirement of new.FamilySearch.org. The continued effort to enhance and improve FamilySearch Family Tree now requires the decommissioning of the program that Family Tree replaced, new.FamilySearch.org. Accordingly, he announced the final milestones for the retirement which will is scheduled for February 1, 2015.
All access to new.familysearch.org will be discontinued, meaning no users will be able to log into the program. The data will be available at www.familysearch.org. All public-facing Application Programming Interfaces (API) will be disabled, which means any third-party software still using nFS will be turned off.
There are still many tasks that the engineers will continue to work on, such as migrating and synchronizing datasets to Family Tree, as well as verifying and validating all data. Because of the enormity of the task and the desire to not lose any data, they can only give an estimate as to how long it will take to complete these final tasks. They estimate it will take at least a year.
When the final milestone is reached, when they completely retire new.FamilySearch.org will, therefore, occur in 2016. At that point, once FamilySearch is certain that all data has been correctly migrated, they will begin work on very important data enhancements for Family Tree including:
The merging of gateway ancestors and other famous people, who are also known as Individuals of Unusual Size or IOUSs will finally be done.
Highlighting and fixing other data issues, such as individuals who are married before they are born, a child older than his parents, child who is a spouse of a parent or grandparent and so forth.
The ability for users to edit the gender of an ancestor will be released.
The ability to see current spouse’s line by default will be automatic.
Personally, the only time I have used new.familysearch.org at all recently is when I am asked a specific question which requires me to look at it. I exclusively use https://familysearch.org/tree/. Hopefully this won’t cause too much anguish, because Family Tree really is a great improvement to new.familysearch.org.
For more information, contact Shanna Jones (435) 628-4900 shannasjones@msn.com