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.