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