TheirStory - A Unique Way to Record Oral Histories

It's hard to belive that less than a month ago more than 30,000 of us from 55 countries were attending the world's largets genealogy conference at RootsTech. Now we are all self isolating and watching as many of our upcoming conferences are being cancelled or going virtual. Is virtual conferencing the way of the future or is it just a survival method for today? One benefit of virtual conferencing is that you can attend without the costs of travel but many people in our genealogy community may not have access to the equipment to attend these virtual conferences. Another problem caused by social distancing is that we can't go to our archives and other brick and morter collections and we are restircted to online data. Additionally, we now have to use different methods to collect information from our families since social gatherings are being restricted.

My last couple blog posts were covering some of the things I learned at RootsTech and the products that are being developed. In this post I will be presenting a site called TheirStory. The idea behind TheirStory is to provide a platform to assist you in gathering family stories through virtual interiews with family members. Their slogan is "Everyone has a story to share."

TheirStory screen shot

The site is not built around a software package so there is no need to download a program. The process is very simple and can be used to interview anyone with a computer or mobile device (phone, tablet, etc). The first step, once you have a subscription to the service is to set up a group where you can invite your family to see the stories. These groups can be organized any way you want, by topic, family, location...you are able to add the stories to each group after the interviews occur. Once you have your groups set up you can launch a session from your account and send the link to the person you want to interview. The link can go to email, messenger, or any other method that the user can access on their device. You will be connected to the call when they access the link and then you can begin recording. The recording is saved to your account and you can associate it with the group(s) that it fits into. These videos are stored in your account but your family can also download them to their computer or sync them to their Google Drive so they have their own copy available at all times. To see a demonstration of how this works, check out their video of a live interview here. You can also set up a group with questions for people to call in at anytime. To see a demo of this click here.

I tested this product during a video call with Zack Ellis, the Founder and CEO of TheirStory. We had a seemless call while I was walking around in my back yard and he recorded the interaction. When our call was done, he just hit stop recording and then we ended the call. It was as simple as that.

For individuals, for a limited time you can set up a family subscription through a one-time payment which is currently $350 (regularly $500) for unlimited lifetime access across your family and live technical support. They also have monthly subscriptions for $12 and annual subscriptions for $120.

In this time of social distancing, collecting your family's stories is a great idea for passing the time. Check out their website and begin collecting your stories today.

RootsTech2020 Follow Up - Vintage Aerial

Sometimes we don't have to look too far back in time to find interesting items to include in our family history. Vintage Aerial is an example of this. Their booth at RootsTech gave people the opportunity to look through their collection to find pictures of their farms and rural homes.

The collection contains 18 million aerial photographs from 41 states. Photographs in their collection date back to the 1960s and cover a large part of the rural eastern US. The area of coverage varies by year, so you may not always find a picture of the property you are looking for.

You can search by address to see if there were any flights in the area. Your search will produce a series of film rolls which you will have to scroll through to find the images you are looking for. Once you find the image you can like, share on Facebook and add a comment about the property. You can also order a variety of prints of the image for your own collection. The people who visited them at RootsTech were given a 4"x6" print of the image at no cost.

How are these images important to your family history? They show how a family's land has changed over time. Did your family add to their home? Did they clear more land? Is there something in the photo, such as a car, that brings back a memory that you had forgotten?

I would like to include a set of the pictures of the house where I grew up as an example of how these can help tell the story of your family's life.

1974 - This is the house I grew up in. We didn't own the house in 1974 but we knew the owner, Kenneth Filburn. He died in an auto accident which occurred on October 21, 1976. The house is up on blocks.

 1979 - We moved into the house around 1977 and survived the Blizzard of '78. It took a lot of work to plow our driveway and the one lane road to our house was snowed in for several days. Looking closely at the picture you can see a cleared area next to the barn. That was our garden. There are also several sheds along the tree line where we stored our wood for the fireplace. We had also added the utility room to the back of the house by this time. There is also a small flower garden and bird bath near the corner of the house. The patch of trees between the driveway and barn was our buckeye grove. The underside of the house has now been closed in.

1982 - There have been more changes by this time. The most noticeable is the pond. All of the material removed from the pond was placed in the clearing to create a hill that gave us more elevation for the pond. There is also a chicken coop in front of the barn. We raised a variety of livestock including chickens, rabbits, sheep, pigs, and ducks. The sheep pen runs along the fence line by the cornfield.

1990 - In this photo you can see that we had added a room to the front of the house as well as a garage between the house and barn. This garage was a 2-car garage with a sunroom on the side where my mom spent much of her time. She had furniture, a small library, and a stereo in that room. There are also rows of pines and Russian olives that we planted along both sides of the pond. I also noticed a picnic table in the area between the pond and woods. Another change is the removal of the green aluminum siding and the addition of white vinyl siding.






Based on those four photographs I was able to cover nearly 20 years of my childhood and write this short story. Imagine what you could do with your family's photos and how that could provide a start to an interview with a grandparent. Check out the site and see if you can find your homes.

RootsTech2020 Follow Up - BYU Record Linking Lab

Good morning, it has now been three days since RootsTech and one day since I arrived back home from the trip to Salt Lake City. As I get caught up on the sleep I missed while at the conference, I will continue to try to blog about some of the products that I saw while at RootsTech.

The BYU Linking Lab is producing some cutting edge products which will increase our ability to do family history in the future. The students manned their booth throughout the RootsTech conference and gave mini classes to explain the projects they are working on.

Reverse Indexing

Reverse Indexing is a new tool that uses handwriting recognition technology to increase the speed at which indexing takes place. You can select the surname you want to index and the computer will display up to 12 occurrences of that surname. It is your task to read through these suggestions and determine if any of them are incorrect. By selecting the incorrect surnames, the computer is being taught how to make better selections. One of the things I like about this product is that you can select the surnames you want to index. If you run out of records for that surname, switch to another surname that you are interested in. Come back later to see if more records are available for your selected surnames. This means that the surnames you are researching can get finished quicker.

Mobile Indexing

Mobile Indexing is another test platform for the computer handwriting recognition software. This application provides one scanned name and several possible matches. You are asked to select the name that matches the image. If none of the names match the image, you can add your own.

The Customized Hints application allows you to customize your hints by surname or location. Try adding a surname to see its distribution from a record set or research a place by putting in a county of your choice. The surname search might not provide many results since the project is in its early stages of development. If you use a place name the results will be mapped. For example, an enumeration district may be displayed with all the names collected in a census for that area mapped to their location. Clicking on the pins will let you see the surname of the person. When you click on the name you will see the record with a suggested match from the FamilySearch family tree. You can then connect that source to the family. This product makes it easy to develop geographic projects. For example, the Linking Lab has ongoing projects to help grow the family trees of African American families in the southeast US. The information on this project can be found in the African American Families Project.

Customized Hints - Shelby County, Ohio

The Nauvoo Community Project is a project that collects data to identify the residents of Nauvoo, Illinois between 1839 and 1846. Each individual is supported by various records and linked to their PID number in FamilySearch. This project is searchable by name.

The First Vision Project is working to make sure all families living near the Palmyra, New York area in 1820 are included in the FamilySearch family tree. This is a difficult project since the 1820 census only included the head of household. Other family members have to be included from other sources.

The Helping New Converts project provides assistance to new converts to the LDS church. The goal is to find 100 temple ready family names for each new convert. Once the new convert has added sufficient information to get back to the 1940 census in their tree in FamilySearch, the RLL team can be contacted to help add more names. These instructions can also be used by Family History Consultants to do the project with the new convert.

The Museum Discovery Experience is currently being developed as a group on Relative Finder. The purpose of the project is to catalog people included in the displays in a museum so visitors can have a discovery experience and see if they have a connection to any of the people in the collections. Projects like this can be developed for any museum collection. The demonstration of this project contains the Maynard Dixon collection at the BYU Art Museum.

The RLL team has also developed a set of Service Projects. These projects can be adopted by youth or adult groups and can be customized for your area. The projects include Census-based Family Trees, Community Reconstitution Projects, World War I US Casualties, Saints by Sea Project, Virginia Funeral Programs, and others. You can use the instructions provided for each project to customize it for your area.

There are also ideas for Youth Projects that include mobile apps. These projects are quick and easy to perform and can be done a little bit at a time. The activities include attaching records on the FamilyTree app, using the Ordinance Ready function to prepare for temple experiences, use the Ralatives Around Me function to discover connections to others, add Tree Extending Hints, and upload photos and memories on the Memories app.

All of these projects are designed to involve you in easy to do activities that will enhance your family history experience. Try a few and see how quickly you can add names to the FamiySearch family tree.Enable GingerCannot connect to Ginger Check your internet connection
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RootsTech2020 Follow Up - Innovations from BYU Tech Lab Part II

Yesterday I wrote about some of the BYU Tech Labs productivity tools. Today I will present some of the fun activities they have been working on. Again, some of these have been around for a while, but some are new and still in development.

Geneopardy is a fun family game based on the concept of a well known similarly named TV game show. The game tests your knowledge of your ancestors with questions from categories such as dates, places, people, facts, and other. Each category has 5 levels of difficulty worth between 100 and 500 points. You can select the number of generations to get questions from and have up to 4 teams playing against each other or do it singularly just to test your own knowledge.

The concept behind Wheel of Family Fortune is similar to another well known TV game show. The game board includes a question about an ancestor, such as "This ancestor was born in 1866", and the blanks to fill in with letters that you choose. Up to four people can play this game, spinning the wheel and selecting letters to maximize their dollar amount.

Ancestor Games includes a variety of simple activities that you can do with your children. The games include the following:

• Matching Game where you have cards with your ancestors' photos which you have to match,
• Ancestor Coloring where you have a photo that has been turned into an outline and you can color it in on the computer or print it out to color,
• Crossword Puzzles based on your ancestors' information,
• Word Search puzzles with information about your ancestors, and
• Word Scramble puzzles with your ancestors' names.

Record Quest is a simple adventure game where your character has to find family history in an interactive way.

Geneography gives you the ability to visualize statistics from the various US Census records. This tool lets you explore various statistics such as marriage age, number of children, and death age in each state. It also provides discussions of major events such as the Civil War and World War II and how these events impacted the statistics.

Reverse Indexing is a new tool that uses handwriting recognition technology to increase the speed at which indexing takes place. You can select the name you want to index and the computer will display up to 12 occurrences of that name. It is your task to read through these suggestions and determine if any of them are incorrect. By selecting the incorrect names, the computer is being taught how to make better selections.

Memri is a beta product being designed as a social networking platform where you and your family can share memories of your lifetime. It can find memories from your FamilySearch account and include those in the Memri pages. You can select what is private and public from your page. 

The Alexa app is currently under development. It is intended to interact with the other BYU Labs products through your Alexa device.

Each of these products is designed to increase participation in family history by making it fun and easy by playing games and completing tasks. Try them out during your next family home evening or other family event and make family history fun.

RootsTech2020 Follow Up - Innovations from BYU Tech Lab

Over the next couple days I will be posting about some of my favorite exhibitors at RootsTech. Today I am featuring the BYU Family History Technology Lab. The students at BYU are creating some fun products and have been talking about them at their booth in the Expo Hall. They even had mini classes on using these tools.

Many of the products from the BYU Tech Lab have been available for several years. These products are designed to increase your ability to research, find errors, display what we have discovered, and make researching fun for the whole family. In this blog, I will focus on some of the productivity tools that they have developed.

You may have heard about Relative Finder already. I know we use it every year at our Family History Conference and regularly in our ward and genealogy society to see how we are related to the people in our groups. This product checks your tree on FamilySearch and looks to see if you are related to any famous people and the people in groups that you create. You can see if you are related to someone from the Mayflower, a leader of the LDS church, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, or any of the other pre-existing groups. It is amazing how we can discover that people we have known for years are actually relatives.

The Virtual Pedigree gives you increased access to your pedigree chart from your FamilySearch account. This product will give you hints, let you know where there might be missing information, and tells you if temple ordinances are missing.

The Descendency Explorer provides LDS church members a way to search their ancestors in FamilySearch and find those who are ready for their temple work to be done. It also tells you if there are potential duplicates. You can select the sex of the individual, types of ordinances to show, and the ancestor you want to use as a starting point.

Tree Sweeper will search your tree and look for potential errors, including children being born before or after parents' child bearing years and parents dying before children are born.

Pedigree Pie creates a 6 generation circular chart which is color coded to show the nationalities of your ancestors. It also shows a breakdown of the percentages for each nationality in your tree. For me, I have a blue circle for a couple generations (US) surrounded by a red circle (Germany).

The One Page Genealogy page gives you the ability to see up to 20 generations of ancestors or descendants on the screen at one time. You can also see some statistics from your tree. For example, I have 75% of my 7th generation and 36% of my 8th generation complete.

The Family Calendar program will search up to 8 generations of your family tree in FamilySearch and pull the important events into a calendar. You can select birth, marriage and death dates as well as a variety of other dates to display in the calendar. Once the calendar is created, it can be downloaded into your Google calendar.

Each of these products is free to use and are there to help you visualize your research. Try them out and see how they can help you focus your research efforts.