Live Roots Adds Access to FamilySearch Record Search Results

According to LiveRoots.com you can now view results from the Record Search pilot from within the Live Roots website.

Quoting from Live Roots website:

The FamilySearch Record Search pilot include millions of indexed records, and is expanding each month. When you perform a search in Live Roots, you will see a link to the FamilySearch Record Search feature in the "Available Partner Services" section.

You also have the ability to search a specific collection within the Record Search pilot from the corresponding resource page. Resources from the pilot are cataloged in Live Roots as soon as they are posted online.

I decided to give this new feature a try so went to the FamilySearch page on Live Roots. I was impressed with the speed of the search and the display of results but wanted to ask Illya D'Addezio, owner and creator of Live Roots, a few questions.

I wondered what the purpose was of adding this feature to the Live Roots website. According to Illya

The objective of Live Roots is to be a genealogical search "experience," not just a simple search engine. When you use a traditional search engine, the experience ends with a listing of results. With Live Roots, that's only the beginning. From the results, Live Roots shows you relationships between resources, and allows you to locate and/or preview related results from
other data repositories (e.g. Ancestry, Footnote, etc.).

What this amounts to is research efficiency, especially when your research involves a lot of repetitive searching, for example, a brick wall ancestor. Using Live Roots you can perform the same search across a dozen different repositories within a few minutes without ever having to reenter your search criteria or leave the Live Roots environment.

When I first used the new feature for FamilySearch, I mistakenly thought I was searching an index but Illya explained that it is not an index/image hosting
initiative, but a real-time, server to server access. This is the same as all of the other partner searches on Live Roots. A search on LiveRoots using the FamilySearch feature results in the LiveRoots server contacting FamilySearch server, obtaining the results and presenting them in LiveRoots in the format determined by Illya.

My concern that new records on Family Search would have a delay before being searching in Live Roots was put to rest when Illya explained this, because his method means that as soon as new records are available on the FamilySearch website, they are immediately available in the Live Roots experience.

My last question to Illya was "Why use the Live Roots FamilySearch feature rather than go directly to the Family Search website" He resonded that

"One of the main advantages to using Live Roots is the consistency it offers between the numerous data and book repositories, along with some of the
research management tools that simplify keeping track of when/where you found a useful resource. Bringing Family Search into the experience just adds to the efficiency, as now when you locate a record in Family Search, you can quickly see if
there are any related records in sites such as Ancestry or Footnote (and vice-versa)"

It's a great utility, and you really should try it out. Start your journey at the FamilySearch page on Live Roots.