Nobody Listens Anyway

The Deseret News writes today, “The Catholic Church has ordered dioceses across the globe not to give information in parish registers to members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” This is a very painful blow not only to the LDS church but to genealogists everywhere. For decades the LDS church [...]

I just got an invite to a FamilySearch Webinar. I imagine you are supposed to be a member of the developer group to attend, but I doubt they would throw you out. Here’s the details:
FamilySearch Developer WebinarJoseph Smith Memorial Building (JSMB) 5th Floor, West Lobby Conference Room 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Agenda:

Introduce Robert [...]

The LDS cultural has encouraged personal history and journal writing since its inception. Ever since then the vast majority of the members have ignored this council and the overall level of guilt among the LDS faithful has continued to rise as each successive generation followed the example of the previous. Technology now provides [...]

I am in the Ruby-fs API presentation now. Funding for the library came from USFamilyTree.com.
It is REST based.
Data model is:
Person
Person has many Assertions
Assertion has one Contributor, Citation(not yet implemented), Note
Each person has a lot of data associated with them so you don’t want to be parsing xml data on the [...]

We’re back from lunch. I had a great chat with Alan Braverman the CTO & founder of Geni. They are doing some cool things by connecting living people with their families and to the larger family graph. They also let you upload photos and other digital assets then assemble that [...]

What do we read out of family search?

Person Information
Search Match
Authorities Data - places
LDS Ordinance Information

Objects available in the new FamilySearch

Person
Search Data
Contributor Information
Place Standardization Data

Can output XML, JSON, and XML-FastInfoset. Request can be gzipped if client supported.
Locate a resource via NFS Id - ‘KWCD-QBC’, Ancestral File Number - ‘afn.2bW3-9H’ or Gedcom UID.
Examples:
https://api.familysearch.org/familytree/v1/person/KWCD-QBC?sessionId=MMMM
https://api.familysearch.org/authorities/v1/place/933423?sessionId=MMMM
https://api.familysearch.org/v1/search?name=Isreal+Hoyt+heaton?sessionId=MMMM
Get the [...]

If these posts don’t make sense sorry. They are for my notes.
API is based on REST. A lot of data is sensitive so they use SSL to secure data transfer. Prefer XML elements over XML attributes. Everything is UTF-8 encoded. Right now user access is limited to LDS members. [...]

I am at the FamilySearch conference at BYU today which means that I had to get up at 5:30 this morning which is one my least favorite things in the world. Luckily caffeine is my friend and I managed to stay awake for the drive down. I did discover this morning that my [...]