RootsTech 2019 - Saturday - 2 March

Last Day of RootsTech

Well, RootsTech 2019 is now over. It was a great week and the crews did a wonderful job of keeping everything running. Since I was speaking today I decided to take it easy on the classes and try to get a few things done before I left.

Today I attended a joint class by FamilySearch and The Family History Guide called Discover, Gather and Connect Your Family Together. This presentation focused on activities we can do with our families and others to encourage family history. It has been found that children with a knowledge of their family history have greater self confidence, self worth, sense of identity and belonging, and can handle stress better. As they learn about their ancestors they gain a better understanding of their world and the trials and celebrations that have come before them.

Elder Bradley D. Foster said "We want everyone to have that discovery experience, because that is what changes their hearts."

So, how do we get our families excited about family history? FamilySearch and The Family History Guide have provided a variety of activity videos to help us. FamilySearch's activities can be found at https://www.familysearch.org/discovery. The list of activities on The Family History Guide can be found at https://www.thefhguide.com/act-index.html. These activities are designed to be age appropriate and suited to any size family, from the individual up to multiple generations. Families can do simple activities such as recording their ancestor's recipes at https://www.familysearch.org/blog/en/recipes. Or they can take on more complex projects such as recreating a part of an ancestor's life (https://www.thefhguide.com/blog/creating-ancestor-connections-fun-ideas-from-the-family-history-guide-childrens-activities-section). Check out the activities pages and see which ones are designed for your family.

I also attended the BYU Family History lunch. The presenter talked about the Family History program at BYU and some of the innovative projects the students are working on. These projects included the Tree Sweeper and Virtual Family Tree. Information about their projects can be found at https://fhtl.byu.edu. They also discussed the Family History degree program and the conferences and webinars they produce.

Tear down of RootsTech 2019

My talk on the Tour of Online European Archives went well. I had good attendance considering the location of the classroom and it being the last class session of the conference. The audience had lots of questions about their favorite archives and seemed to be genuinely interested in the topic.

Now the crews are taking down the conference and getting ready for the next event. We will all have to wait another year for RootsTech 2020 which will be held on February 26-29. I hope to see my friends, both new and old, there next year.

RootsTech 2019 - Friday - 1 March

Crowds at RootsTech

Three days into RootsTech and I am still alive. There are so many things to do here that many genealogists are overwhelmed trying to learn everything we can in only 4 days. They have said there were 15,000 pre-registered attendees for the conference. Saturday is Discovery Day and the crowds are expected to increase by several thousand more.

Today was my day to focus on some German research classes. One class I attended focused on German Family Research in the Digital Age. This class was led by Dietmar Cziesla of FamilySearch and Andreas Hedwig from the Hessisches Landesarchiv. There were a couple major points presented concerning how Germans feel about the use of social media and sharing information. While 50-60% of Germans have Facebook accounts, they don't share information like Americans. They tend to use the WhatsApp app because they feel it is more private. This is evidenced by the fact that between 83% and 96% of Germans, depending on age group, have WhatsApp accounts. Also, Germans are not as likely to do DNA tests but Ancestry and MyHeritage are trying to increase the comfort level so more will provide DNA samples and more matches might become available in the next few years.

Currently there are 50 million German record images available online, 30 million of those are from Hesse. The physical records in Germany are held in 65 different archives and consist of over 1,000 miles of shelves. One collection that was mentioned was the War Maps collection. I found it interesting that this collection contained detailed maps of the east coast of the US. The oldest records in the German archives date back to the 8th century and church parish records start in the 14th century. The partnership between FamilySearch and the Hessisches Landesarchiv has resulted in 11 million digital record images being put online. They are now working on hand writing recognition applications and expect surname indexes to be available within the next couple years. Place searches are already available for these records. One great resource in the German archives is the website www.arcinsys.de. Check it out to see the number of collections already available. Additionally, FamilySearch has five digital camera crews currently working in Germany to digitize new records and they have a partnership with Ancestry to index the German Lutheran Church records.

MyHeritage DNA AutoCluster

MyHeritage talked about some of their new DNA tools - AutoClusters and the Family Theory of Relativity. Both of these will make DNA relative discoveries much more efficient. The AutoClusters organizes shared DNA matches into clusters of related individuals. Each cluster likely has a common shared ancestor. Once you find a cluster (a block of similar colored boxes), you can begin to determine how that group is related.

MyHeritage's other new DNA tool, the Family Theory of Relativity, uses data from various sources including family trees from MyHeritage, FamilySearch and Geni, along with records such as censuses, and DNA matches to build an estimated family tree which shows how you may be related to a DNA match. All that is required to develop a theory is for both individuals to have a family tree on MyHeritage with at least 1 person in the tree connected to the DNA sample. Users are expected to review these matches and provide feedback as to the accuracy of the estimates.

MyHeritage also announced an extension to their DNA Quest program which was started at RootsTech last year. That program contributed 15,000 DNA kits to adoptees and provided support to find their biological families. This year, they will provide an additional 5,000 kits. The program starts today and runs through April 30. Adoptees can register for the program at www.dnaquest.com. 

I hope you have enjoyed reading my posts about what is happening at RootsTech. I will be speaking tomorrow so I don't know how many classes I will be attending. So, I'll say goodnight for now. 

RootsTech 2019 - Thursday - 28 February

Are these your ancestors?

Hi there, day two of RootsTech is now over. It was another busy day and I am going on only 4 hours sleep (time change problem). So, what happened today? I spent more time in the Expo Hall today talking to vendors and seeing what new things were available. I also ran into these guys in the picture. I wonder if they are related to me?

My first class was New FamilySearch Record Innovations. This class discussed how records will be changing over the coming years. One thing they discussed was indexing. Last year there were 260 million records indexed by 327,696 indexers. In 2019, researchers will be able to thank the indexers for the records they worked on. Each indexed record will be linked to the indexers and arbitrator that worked on that record and there will be a Thank You button which the researcher can click to send a message to the indexers and arbitrator. This will probably be released sometime around July/August. Also, later this year, indexers will be able to take advantage of automatic name and place lookups. Names and place names will automatically be filled in as the indexer types the information for the record. This is currently in final testing. Additionally, there will be new ways to volunteer so that more indexers will be available to handle the increased number of digitized records. If you remember from my post yesterday, we are currently 40 years behind in indexing and each year enough new records are digitized to add another decade to the backlog. That means by the end of 2020 we will have a 60 year backlog of digitized images needing to be indexed. Another new item is that users will be able to edit records in the record details screen of the search results. This will start with being able to correct errors in names but will eventually expand to include places and other fields.

And what about all those unindexed records? There are currently 3.65 billion images available on FamilySearch. 1.36 billion of those images are browse only while 915.4 million of them are in the Family History Catalog. Only about 20% of the total number of images are indexed and that percentage is decreasing every year as new records are added. Currently it takes an average of 249 days for an image to go from digitization to being published on the FamilySearch website. Soon that time lag will be decreased to only 24 hours. Imagine that the images are scanned one day and available online the next day.

Explore Historical Images beta site

FamilySearch is now beta testing the Explore Historical Images function. This page allows you to search by place, date, event or film number and will provide a list of images not yet searchable or browseable through the regular FamilySearch website. As an example, I took the screenshot of the results for Auglaize County, Ohio. There ended up being 93 record sets for this area that are not yet available on FamilySearch but I can see them here and search through the tens of thousands of new images.

Additionally, FamilySearch again reiterated their work with computer aided indexing. The computers aren't as accurate as human indexers but they can more quickly index large numbers of typed records. The example of the GenealogyBank Obituary Collection only taking 3 weeks to provide 50 million indexed records was discussed and they also announced plans to add another 38 million more records very soon.

Ancestry Labs beta projects

The General Session featured Ancestry.com and some of their big news. Ancestry announced that they currently have more than 15 million people in their DNA network and they announced the release of DNA ThruLines in beta this week. This is another way to look at your DNA results and see connections between people. They also announced MyTreeTags which allows users to tag information to highlight details or tag for future research. These products can be accessed at https://www.ancestry.com/beta. Ancestry also announced several new expansion areas including 12 new state vital record collections, expanded US immigration/naturalization collections, expanded US WW II draft card collection, the world's largest obituary collection (newspapers.com), global expansion by adding more records for Denmark, France, Finland, Mexico and Norway, and 94 new African American DNA Communities.

Patricia Heaton, from Everybody Loves Raymond, finished off the General Session by talking about her family and the stories around them.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

I attended the Ancestry sponsored lunch where Henry Louis Gates, Jr. spoke about a short film project called Railroad Ties. Railroad Ties was based on the story of the underground railroad and more specifically the escape of Mary Weems from slavery. The story revolved around 6 strangers and how genealogy research was able to connect them all to this event. If you want to see the story you can go to https://www.ancestry.com/cs/railroadties.

I thought Henry Louis Gates, Jr. made some very profound statements during this discussion.  He said "One of the biggest misconceptions today is the idea of racial purity." The average African American is 25% European. He himself is 50% European based on his DNA. Even European Americans are mixed ethnicity, having portions of their DNA represented in several different countries. He also said "We are all united in our amnesia of our ancestors." At one time he thought the lack of knowledge of ones ancestors was specific to African Americans. He believed that they didn't know about their ancestors because of the impact of slavery but after researching the genealogies of various people for his TV shows, he realized that we all have a lack of knowledge that basically begins with our great grandparents lives. We have very little concept of who our ancestors were beginning only 3 generations ago. He believes that "Genealogy can revolutionize how we teach American and World History." If we realized how our ancestors were involved in history or affected by it, we would have a greater appreciation for the history that we study in schools.

As always, there was so much to learn today that I can't provide everything in just one blog. If you want to see some of the talks that were given this week, you can visit the RootsTech YouTube page at https://www.youtube.com/user/FamilySearch/videos. I hope this information is helpful to you. Now, it is time for me to get some sleep because tomorrow is another packed day.  Goodnight!