Randy Seaver is my hero...

...for today at least. Let me explain.

This afternoon I was talking to other members of the Family History team at The National Archives about the imminent change from the old, familiar FamilySearch to the all-singing, all-dancing version as on the Beta site. As far as I knew this was going to happen quite soon, and warned them that we should familiarise ourselves with the way the new site works, so that we would be prepared when our regular users went to the site and got a surprise.

Then I went on duty at our (shiny new) enquiry desk for the evening shift, 5-7pm. After we closed, I went back to my own desk to pack up and go home, and before I went I had a quick peek at Twitter. And there it was, Randy's tweet 'FamilySearch.org has changed'. He was the first with this important news to reach my corner of the Blogophere, Twitterverse or what you will. Not only that, he alerted us to the (not at all prominent) link at the bottom of the homepage in tiny writing to get you back to the old site.

Tomorrow is my day off, so I won't be there to help out with any queries, but I was able to send a quick message round the office to my colleagues to warn them of the change before I went home.  So thank you, Randy, for the heads-up; your quick action might just have saved readers, and possibly staff, at The National Archives from a fit of the vapours. Forewarned is forearmed.

 Round of applause, please, everyone for Randy and his Genea-musings blog!