FamilySearch Participe +4

Pros: This is a great, easy to use app! It helps me stay off YouTube/TikTok/news sites and encourages me to do something valuable in a short amount of time. I probably log about 100 names on average throughout each day, often in small small amounts.

Con: The app isn’t as reliable as I’d like it to be. When I open it up and tap “Review Names”, about 2/5 times I’ll get a message saying “An error occurred. Please try again later.” I leave the filters as broad as possible to see if that helps, but it usually doesn’t. (This is for the regular search button and the 1950 census button). For a person like me that has a passion for indexing and family history, it isn’t too much of a bother, but I imagine it could turn off a lot of users if they encounter this as frequently as I do.

I love the opportunity to help review names, and the convenience of being able to use my iPhone to help family history progress! I can review names when waiting in line at the store or when I have a few minutes to spare. Easy. There are several bugs in this app; but perhaps the worst is a newer bug that name swaps. When you click, “Incorrect Highlight” or hit the “Back” button, the contents of the text box gets stuck on the last name you reported as “Incorrect Highlight”, or approved as a “Match”. This can be corrected by clicking “Unsure”, but it took some experimenting to figure out.

A glitch that has been a problem for awhile is the thermometer/counter, which doesn’t work regularly once you get past about 300k names. I have been stuck at under 400K for several months, and easily done 2 million or more names.
Please provide an update to this app. You’ve started such a wonderful thing. Thank you!

I think this is a great project, and I’m excited to help. I like the app because I can do a few names any time I have a few minutes waiting somewhere. I also like that I can zoom the image in very close to make out tricky names, better than on the web site.

My main complaint is that the app has not yet fixed the issue of filtering by state. This was fixed on the website to pull up documents from the state in question, while the app still pulls documents from any random state as long a one person came from the filtered state. One star loss for that.
Secondarily, a minor issue is that marking an entry Not a Person requires two separate tap actions, while it is a single click on the web site.