RootsTech2020 - Day 4

The fourth day of RootsTech was another great day of learning and networking. My first class this morning was Practical Tools for Family Storytellers. This class walked you through the various steps in recording your family information and getting it together in a format that can be shared with the family.

The first step that they talked about was collecting oral histories. The most important thing to do is to just get started. Do it in small bits, don't overwhelm the person with lots of questions - this isn't the Spanish Inquisition. Make it enjoyable for them and let them share their memories. Ask questions that elicit feeling and follow up with questions to bring out the details. Avoid yes/no questions and questions that can be answered with one word.

They also discussed tools to make writing easier. Look for tools that enable idea banking, brainstorming, mind mapping, or timeline development. Idea banking is collecting your ideas as you have them. This is like a series of post-it notes that act as reminders of your ideas later on. Brainstorming should be a spontaneous thing. Write down ideas and follow that train of thought without taking the time to edit. Mind mapping is a visual representation of your thoughts showing interconnections and relationships of ideas by connecting them with lines. You start with your main idea and begin to build branches with related ideas. Timelines allow you to organize your ideas in a chronological order so you can see where gaps may exits that need to be followed up.  Each of these processes can help you organize your thoughts. Some examples of tools they discussed include WiseMapping, MindMeister, MindMup, Coggle, and Scapple. There are also several timeline applications that can help you organize your ideas. These include Twile, the Timeline on FamilySearch, and OurTimelines. The OurTimelines webpage provides historical context and events. You can also make your own timelines with Preceden and Aeon:Timeline2.

Once you get your ideas together you need to organize them. They suggested using Trello and Scrivener to help organize. Scrivener helps organize your ideas, maintains versioning of the documents, collects research notes and the report all in one dashboard, and links to other applications including Aeon Timeline and Scapple.

Now you can start writing. They suggested Blurb Book Wright and Kindle Create since they format the pages into print styles for books. Once you start writing you may need help editing your stories. Websites such as Grammarly, Pro Writing Aid, Ginger Software, and Hemmingway Editor can help you with this process. Some of these are apps which integrate into your Chrome browser and check your writing as you do it. You also need to keep on task by creating to do lists. ToDoIst is one way to do this.

Now that you have laid out the pages and created the stories you are ready for printing. Printing your stories can be done at home on your own printer, at an office supply store, or at a printer. You can also print it online at sites such as Lulu or Amazon Prints. So, what are you waiting for? Just start and see where the story goes.

The second class this morning was Family History Activities in Minutes. The activities in this class focused on the FamilyTree and Memories apps from FamilySearch. These apps have a variety of activities that can be done in 5 to 10 minutes. The FamilyTree app has a menu item "Family History Activities" with a variety of interactive activities based on the information for your ancestors in the Family Tree. One activity, Picture My Heritage, provides an ethnic breakdown based on your tree and allows you to take a selfie with the clothes of your country of choice. You can also create a fan chart of your family from the pedigree view on your phone. Go to settings and turn on the Fan Chart function. Once you see the fan chart go to the bottom of the page and click on the green slider bar button to change the way the fan chart looks. Another activity is Relatives Around Me. This can be found under the pull down menu. It searches for others who have the app turned on and lists their relationship to you based on the FamilyTree. These apps can help introduce family history in a fun way that is not intimidating.

The rest of the day was spent in the Expo Hall talking to the various vendors. I hope to have a series of blogs in the next couple weeks discussing the companies that I talked to. Many of them have some extraordinary ideas that could change the way we look at family history.

Now that RootsTech is over for another year (unless you're going to London on November 5-6) I will be trying out the new ideas that I have learned. Many of the ideas are fun while others are more technical or business related. That is what is so great about RootsTech, there are classes for everyone of all experience levels and interests. If you are interested in attending future RootsTech events remember that the 2021 conference is scheduled for February 3-6, 2021 in Salt Lake City. Begin making your plans now.

RootsTech2020 - Day 3

Another day at RootsTech! One thing about RootsTech is that there are so many potential classes that it is hard to figure out which ones to go to. Yesterday my wife decided to spend her morning in the Ancestry booth attending their mini classes and had some great instruction on their DNA tools. Today I had scheduled several FamilySearch classes but after talking to several people in the Expo Hall, I decided to switch it all up and changed my schedule to include classes on accreditation. It has been my plan to become accredited at some time but I always say that I am too busy to make that commitment. I don't ever think I will slow down, so now is as good a time as any to start the process.

The accreditation track of classes was sponsored by ICAPGen and included the following:

• Accreditation: What, Why, and How taught by Diana Elder author of Research Like a Pro and blogger at Family Locket, and Jenny Hansen blogger at My Favorite Ancestor
• A Deep Dive into Locality Research taught by Mindy Taylor from Price Genealogy
• Put It in Writing: Effective Research Reports taught by Jana Greenhalgh blogger at The Genealogy Kids and Lisa Stokes from Lisa Stokes Heritage Research
• Dealing With Documents: Analysis, Extraction, Transcription and Abstraction taught by Mindy Taylor

In addition to those classes I attended a blogger class titled Taking Your Blog from Blah to Beautiful by Amy Johnson Crow, author of the blog Amy Johnson Crow Modern Genealogy Made Easy. This class presented techniques to improve your blog and make it more attractive and user friendly. I'll have to start using the ideas that she talked about in my blog.

During lunch I attended the MyHeritage sponsored lunch. MyHeritage talked about a few of their new developments. 

One of the new developments was their photo colorization tool. The tool was designed in reverse, taking color photos and making them black and white and then digitally aging them. As the computer learned the way to make the photos black and white it was also able to begin doing the process in reverse. During the first week that the tool was available there were over 1 million photos colorized by users. During the first 2 weeks of use it was mentioned in social media more than 60,000 times. You can colorize up to 10 photos for free. If you want to do more than that you will have to subscribe to MyHeritage. 

Another new development was the addition of 1.3 billion records from over 25,000 US City Directories. These records were consolidated to group records which now represent 545 million individual records. This collection was released today! The computer algorithm is able to estimate life events such as marriage and death dates based on the presence or absence of a person in the directory. The algorithm development and collection/processing of the digital images took over 2 years.

The third development that was released is the fan view chart. This chart can show up to 10 generations. Data can be added directly to the people in the fan view and colors are added to distinguish your family lines. They have also made the fan chart shareable on social media. The fan chart can be found by clicking on the Family Tree menu and then selecting the fan view icon.

MyHeritage had a virtual reality presentation at RootsTech that allows you to experience life as the Pilgrims on the Mayflower in celebration of the 400th anniversary. They are also looking for DNA from descendants of Mayflower descendants.

MyHeritage also announced their MyHeritage Education website. This collection is a knowledge base of educational content to master your skills and help you make the most of your research.

As if that wasn't enough, MyHeritage is preparing for the 24-hour Genealogy Webinar Marathon on March 12-13. They already have 6,000 people registered to watch the webinar. You can learn more at the Family Tree Webinar website.

One last announcement from MyHeritage...They have scheduled their next MyHeritage Live Conference in Tel Aviv on October 25-26, 2020. You can learn more about this conference on their webpage. You might want to consider having a combined trip to Tel Aviv for the conference on October 25-26 and then off to London for RootsTech on November 5-6 this fall.

Between the accreditation track and MyHeritage's announcements this has been a great day at RootsTech. One more day left here and then we can begin thinking about coming home. RootsTech 2021 will be held February 3-6, 2021. Time for you to start planning how you can attend this one of a kind event.

RootsTech2020 - Day 2 - Innovation Showcase

It's day 2 of RootsTech! With day 2 we stepped back into the roots of RootsTech by having an Innovation and Technology Session which lasted 2 hours. This session talked about some of the innovations that have come about over the last year and what some companies are working on for the future.

Clark Gilbert, President of BYU Pathway Worlwide gave a talk entitled Trapped by the Crowd: When Wisdom Becomes Folly. In his talk, he gave several examples of businesses that failed to innovate when faced with new technological advancements and how that became the downfall of some of them. Western Union failed to realize the potential of the telephone as they continued to develop the telegraph. DEC failed to consider the market for personal computers as the continued to develop their large commercial mainframe computers. He said there are 5 reasons we follow the crowd and fail to innovate: 1) Peer Pressure, 2) Familiarity Failures, 3) Hardened Habits, 4) Everyday Decisions, and 5) Different Performance Criteria. Following any one of these can cause you to miss an opportunity to innovate and move beyond your competition. We fail to innovate because we see it as being something difficult. In order to accept innovation we need to create a context where it is encouraged. Take risks to gain the rewards. As he was speaking I started to think about the things that I do which are outside the box. I sometimes say "I'm not afraid to fail but I need the opportunities and resources in order to try." I have come up with many innovative practices, both in business and in my personal life. Not all of them have been successful. In fact, most of those ideas have not resulted in a completed project that succeeds. But, the process has taught me many lessons and has helped others find paths to success.

Josh Taylor talked about the innovations in family history, starting with the development of microfilm, moving to CD-ROMs, the internet, and now to digitization of records. Other innovations which have helped move the work forward include crowd sourced indexing, consumer DNA kits, and automated hints and matches. He said "The world before shaky leaves was a very shaky world." But what do we still need? We need tools to make family history more accessible. We need technology that assists us in interpreting and understanding records. We need technology that helps us learn. And we need technology to improve our ability to share.

Ancestry presented a new product that is currently in beta called Story Scout. This product uses a few sources to build the story of your ancestor. It starts with a basic matching record then looks for other details to create a narrative of the person within the context of their time and location.

Treasured Inc., talked about how photographs disintegrate, photo albums sit on shelves, knowledge is lost as the older generation passes, and stories are not passed between generations. To counter that, they have developed a fun and immersive interactive archive in a virtual world where you can populate a museum and other buildings with your families photographs and stories. This program allows you to tell stories, create adventures, and share your archived world with your family.

WieWasWie, an archive in the Netherlands, demonstrated their Links Project. This project is able to reconstruct families in the Netherlands from 1811 to 1945 and build up to 3 generation pedigrees by comparing the dates, events, names and ages included in various records. 87% of the marriage records in the archives were able to be used for this project. The resulting pedigrees are rated by quality and a report of errors is provided so the application can continue to improve over time.

FamilySearch talked about the advancements from the first IGI microfiche back in 1975, to the opening of the Record Search Pilot for digital images in 2007, to today where over 4 billion digital images are now available on FamilySearch. Their ongoing imaging work results in an additional 8 to 10 million pages added each week and now the images are able to be added to the FamilySearch collections within 24 hours of being imaged.

Filae talked about their Geo Search function which uses maps to help narrow down search results. Each of the search results is geo-referenced and placed on a map so the user can select records by location more easily.

FindMyPast stated that they had added 1.5 billion new records in 2019. That is a rate of 4 million new names each day. The 1939 Register had about 10 million redacted names when it was originally put online. But now they have researched and found 4 million of those names can now be published due to the person being deceased. They are working on getting the 1921 UK Census ready for publication in 2022 and have increased the number of searchable newspapers with over 36 million pages now available in the British Newspaper Archives collection. This newspaper collection has records beginning in the 1700s. They are combining OCR and community crowd sourcing to make those pages searchable. They have also opened up their Tree to Tree hints with 99% of their family tree owners opting in to make their trees public.

The final company to discuss their innovations was The Time Machine. I discussed this site yesterday and in my RootsTech London blog but I think this is one of the most incredible innovations that has been presented at RootsTech so far. This project is trying to link together millions of records to tell the stories of the inhabitants of various European communities. It links their social networks, historic maps, and other public domain information to build a contextual representation for each person.

As we look at technological advancements we need to remember that we learn by action and experience, and that creating "the Story of You" brings us so much closer to our ancestors. Genealogy becomes family history which is now evolving into family discovery. So, go out and discover your families of yesterday as well as those you have today.

RootsTech 2020 - Day 1

Day 1 of RootsTech in Salt Lake City begins the 10th anniversary of the event. I can't believe this is my fifth year attending. Each year I have come in a different role. The first year I was an attendee. The second year I was a volunteer. Last year I was a speaker. This year I am working in the expo hall with The Family History Guide.  Each experience has been great, I have learned a lot from the classes, and I have made many friends while at RootsTech.

So, in my previous blog, I mentioned some exciting news. Do you want to know what it is? (drum roll please) - RootsTech is returning to London! The conference will be held November 5-7, 2020 at the ExCel Center. Early bird registration will start at £79 for the full conference and £39 for one day passes. Registration is now open at https://rootstech2020london.smarteventscloud.com/portal/login.ww.

My wife and her niece meeting for the first time at RootsTech

In other big news, this was my wife's first time meeting her niece. RootsTech bringing families together!

Now that the big news is out, let's talk about what happened at RootsTech Salt Lake today. I'll start with the non-class items.

Genealogy Community Builders Forum with FamilySearch was this morning. This project developed when a small group of us from around the country met at last year's RootsTech for some brainstorming. We started having monthly teleconferences which we called The Bridge, where we discussed how we could bridge the gap between the genealogy community and the general public. Over the course of the year we evolved and started a Facebook group called Connecting Family History with Local Community. The Facebook group allowed us to grow the network of individuals interested in sharing experiences connecting with their local communities. Now we have added a FamilySearch Community called Family History Community Connections.

I also had a discussion with MyHeritage where we discussed what I thought were the highlights from MyHeritage that have helped my family history research. This interview was video taped and will be posted later.

My wife and I attended the FamilySearch sponsored lunch where we learned about some of the new projects that we can expect to see this year. Many of the items discussed were the same as last year, including faster access to digitized records, new technology which allowed for faster indexing of records, an increase in the number of field teams digitizing records, and a focus on collecting oral histories. There are now more than 4 billion images on FamilySearch and this number is increasing by the second. As an example of how fast images are being added, there were 41 collections updated or added just today. You can sort the new collections by date to see what has been added. Some collections are being updated within 24 hours of the images being filmed. New technology is increasing the rate at which images are being indexed. About 30 years ago the 1880 census was indexed in 17 years. The 1930 census was added in 2002 in about 15 months. In 2012 the 1940 census was added in 4 months. When the 1950 census comes out in 2022 we might see it indexed in about 1 month. Right now about 2 million top tier records are added each day. The number of oral histories has also been increasing. Currently there is a focus on recording the oral histories of African elders. There are now 47,000 oral histories containing 57 million individuals. One last advancement is the increased use of smart optical character recognition (OCR). This allows the computer to recognize people, places and relationships based on the context of the document. Using this technology they were able to index 25 million obituaries in 8 hours.

In addition to these activities I was able to attend several classes. The first class of the morning was Big Data of the Past - The Fundament for Building a Family Tree of Mankind. The presentation was about the Time Machine Organization. This presentation was given at RootsTech London and I wanted to see how things have advanced since then. This is an incredible project which uses handwriting recognition to evaluate documents, gather data, and correlate events. When it is fully developed it will be able to reconstruct the populations of the past. Images of places can be put together to build digital models of a city. Records will place people within those communities and provide background information about their lives and social interactions. They have a website called Xarxes that displays an example of how this is expected to work.

I also attended D. Joshua Taylor's presentation of My Ancestor was a Farmer: Telling Their Stories. The focus of this talk was on the records that can be used to characterize a farmer's life. One very important record set for farmers is the US Census. These records provide occupations as well as family structure information and some can provide real and personal property values. Beyond the census records there are non-population schedules such as the Agriculture Schedules. These records contain details about the production of the farms. They were collected from 1840 until 1910 but the records from 1890 to 1910 were destroyed. The remaining records (1840-1880) are not all located in one location. Some are at the National Archives, others are on Ancestry, while still others are in state archives. Knowing where these records are located is half the battle. He also discussed other records such as probate, estate, newspaper advertisements and classifieds, associations and organizations, and land and tax records which can be used to build the story of your farming ancestors.

The last class I attended was Put a Face to a Name - Finding Old Family Photos by Lisa Lisson. This presentation discussed how you can find family photos. She stated "No 'cousin' is too far geographically or on the family tree not to have photos of your ancestors (or at least information) on your old family photos." There are many sites where family photos can be found including Archive.org, Flickr, and eBay. Additionally, collections of yearbooks, church histories, published family histories and online family trees can be good sources for photos. And for those of you who have black sheep in your families, don't forget the mugshots.

As you can see, there are many different topics being presented at RootsTech. I hope everyone attending is able to attend the classes they are wanting to hear. For those of you at home, the live stream schedule can be found here.

RootsTech 2020 - The Day Before

It is time for a new episode of RootsTech, their 10th anniversary. Most of the attendees are beginning to arrive and headed out to do some sight seeing, visit the Family History Library to do some research, or just get together for some socializing. We got in last night and met up with Elizabeth Swaney O'Neal, a fellow blogger and Ambassador for RootsTech. We shared an Uber ride to the hotel and had time to discuss our families and what we are working on. Networking is a major part of the RootsTech experience.

My wife came along with me this time and she is trying to acclimate to the dry and cold conditions. It is a big change from Florida and I think her gills are drying out. You definitely have to drink your water while you are here. And then I injured my elbow and now have limited mobility in the left arm, that will make it hard to keep up on my blogging. Luckily I only use two fingers when typing and my right hand handles about 2/3 of the keyboard so it isn't too much of a handicap.

The exciting part of this week for my wife is meeting a couple relatives for the first time and attending a wedding reception for one of her old Primary kids. She is also looking forward to getting some time to do some research in the Family History Library where she will try to prove her DNA results by focusing on three sons of a common ancestor to see which line is hers. I'm looking forward to the conference, meeting some friends, and networking more with the other genealogists. I will be pretty busy attending classes, working at The Family History Guide booth, meeting with FamilySearch and MyHeritage staff, and just socializing.

So, what do we do the day before RootsTech officially starts? Since this is her first time in Salt Lake City, we spent our time with sightseeing and some networking. My wife and I explored the area around the Salt Palace. Our first stop was the Church History Museum. They had done a renovation a couple years ago and the displays and stories were well designed and engaging. We talked to several of the people working there and learned more about the events in the churches history. Afterwards, we went to the Family History Library to do a little research. We selected a work station and began looking for my wife's brick wall, James Albert Walker and then I heard someone from an adjacent work station call my name, it was one of my genealogy friends from The Second Life Virtual Genealogy Society. We had a short conversation and then it was time to head out for the next activity.

Geneablogger lunch with Fran Kitto and Cathie Sherwod

Then it was off to lunch at the Blue Lemon with the Geneabloggers. The Geneabloggers are a group of genealogy bloggers who socialize on Facebook. We share our stories and interests and hopefully inspire others to take on the challenges and joys of family history research. My wife and I sat with two bloggers from Australia, Cathie Sherwood and Fran Kitto. We had a great time discussing Australia and their research as well as my wife's Australian relatives.

The organ in the Tabernacle.

Temple Square is partially closed due to construction but we were able to visit the Assembly Hall, Tabernacle, and North Visitor Center. At each location, the missionaries gave us tours and explained the history and meaning of the various locations. Then we went to the Conference Center and got a nice tour of the location from two sister missionaries from Canada. We even went onto the roof of the Conference Center to see all the dormant plants up there. Each side of the roof is planted with vegetation from the respective side of Utah.

Registration for RootsTech opened at 4:00, so we went to the Salt Palace to take care of our registration. Registration and checking in is so much easier and quicker now with all the prep that the RootsTech staff have done. We were done in seconds. Then it was off to explore the classroom locations and see who was around. The Speakers and Ambassadors had their meet and greets during the afternoon also so I was able to see many of my old friends and see what they have been up to.

By this time my wife was totally exhausted so we headed back to our hotel for a quick bite and some rest. It was a bit crowded on the sidewalks with crowds of people headed to the Vivant Arena to see the Miranda Lambert concert. As we were walking we started talking to some of them, mainly about the weather and our "winter coats" from Florida, which were basically light jackets.

There is so much to do and so little time to do it while we are here at RootsTech. Oh, and wait for the big announcement in my blog post this evening. What will be happening with RootsTech in the future? You will have to wait to find out. Until then, have a great day.