Understanding Get Involved Statistics

(Note: The My Impact feature is still in the testing phase. Each day, we make it available to a small audience of randomly selected users. Once testing is complete, My Impact will be available to everyone who visits the FamilySearch website.)

Get Involved reports all volunteer contributions made between 2013 and the present. This includes identifying when and where your contributions have helped people.

Our engineers have worked diligently to gather this information, but due to the age of some of the data, there may be some mistakes or omissions. We apologize in advance for these inaccuracies and hope they won’t lessen the joy you feel in helping.

Outlined below are some specific methods we use to capture volunteer statistics and some sources of inaccuracy we have encountered:

Indexing Contributions

• The indexing counts on the Indexing opportunity card come from FamilySearch Indexing.
• Indexing, reviewing, and other indexing-related tasks are all reflected in your indexing total.
• In certain cases, a Contribution By Country card may be missing contributions due to the fact that our older indexing databases did not capture the country of origin of the indexed record.
  • If the country of origin was missing, we assigned it to a country based on your other contributions.
  • The sum of the indexing contributions in the Contribution By Country cards should still be accurate and agree with the Indexing activity card.

Name Review Contributions

• Selecting Match or Edit counts as a review but Unsure (skip) does not count as a review.
• Name Reviews completed for the 1950 Census project are counted as Name Review contributions.

Impacts

• Indexing, reviewing, and other indexing-related tasks are all referred to as “Indexing” on impact cards.
• On occasion, sensitive data in Family Tree or missing details from older indexing projects limit what can be displayed on an impact card.
  • When data is missing, the description of the impact will not be as specific.
  • In other cases, you may see a generic card with little or no data.
  • We know your contribution helped someone, but we are unable to display the details.
• The category People You Helped Find may include cases where the person was already in Family Tree when the record you contributed was attached to their profile. These are meaningful additions that improve accuracy and resolve questions.
• General record edits and 1950 Census Indexing Reviews are included in volunteer statistics and appear simply as Reviews.
• Impacts reflect only what has happened so far.
  • We still have many indexed records and reviewed names waiting to be found, some of which you may have contributed to.
  • As soon as these records and names are found, new cards will appear for you in Get Involved. Such events can happen years after you made your contribution.

Thank you for taking the time to improve historical records and the FamilySearch Family Tree. We hope you enjoy learning about how your efforts are helping others.