Our Utah Mayflower Society Spring Banquet is scheduled for Wednesday, May 8, 2019 at 6:30 p.m. in the Empire Room of the Joseph Smith Memorial Building in Salt Lake City, Utah.
We are looking forward to hearing from David S. Barss, Project Manager for the FamilySearch/General Society of Mayflower Descendants/New England Historical Genealogical Society 2020 Mayflower Digitization Project. Barss has been involved in genealogical research and related activities since he graduated from Utah State University with a bachelor’s degree in history in 1977. As an Accredited Genealogist specializing in the New England and Mid-Western States of the United States, he has shared his expertise both personally and professionally from that day forward. Earlier in his career, he managed lineage linked databases for genealogical companies. From there he devoted five years to doing client research in the records for the United States and Canada, working in the New England, Mid-Western, Mid-Atlantic, and Southern States, plus occasionally the records of England, Ireland, and Scotland.
In 1991 Barss became a full-time employee of what is now FamilySearch International, working in the Family History Library as a reference consultant for United States and Canada records – and later serving as supervisor for that unit. He began working with the database that would eventually generate the International Genealogical Index in 1998. In 2006 he began working on the Community Trees Project, an effort to build the genealogy of a whole community (town or county, or ethnic or religious group, etc.) from their extracted records. This process is currently called Family Reconstitution – and Barss is still very much involved in those efforts. FamilySearch has published 220 Community Trees, and more are in process. The largest collection is the Norway Project with 155 Clerical Districts published so far. He later contributed his expertise to publish 46 million records from an older extraction process – and additionally served as Project Manager for the publication of FamilySearch’s Sub-Saharan Africa Oral Genealogies Project.