RootsTech Connect 2021 - Day 1 - Innovations

After all the waiting, class preparation, session development, meetings, and everything else over the last couple months we are finally ready to start RootsTech Connect 2021. This was an incredible undertaking by the RootsTech team to get everything set up in such a short time and to help all of us with deadlines and questions to get to a point where this conference is today. And after all the work, we were able to experience the opening of the Expo Hall tonight and get ready for the first set of talks. 

One of my favorite parts of RootsTech is talking to the innovators and exhibitors. This year there are 14 Innovators at RootsTech. Some of the innovators, such as Adobe and MyHeritage, are showing off their photo restoration and enhancement capabilities. Adobe has their Photoshop, Lightroom, and Spark software on display. While MyHeritage was showing off their colorization and photo enhancement tools that they introduced in 2020. MyHeritage has had over 30 million photos enhanced using these applications. Adobe and MyHeritage are on total opposite ends of the spectrum for photo restoration and enhancement. MyHeritage allows users to upload their photos to the website for free and does a quick enhancement with no user based controls. MyHeritage's products are impressive and easy to do. Adobe is a more complex process which may require the user to manipulate various controls to get a specific outcome. Of course the user has more control with the Adobe products. Also, Spark provides ways to share your family photos on the web or in social media.

Another area of RootsTech that I like is the Demo Theater. This is where sponsors and exhibitors talk about their new developments, helpful products, and many other topics.

For tonight, my favorite innovation is FamilySearch's demonstration of their computer assisted indexing which is designed to be able to read handwriting in multiple languages. I tried it out with a marriage record written in German. It was pretty good but still had some errors. Overall, I think it did well enough to get a good start on the translation considering the quality of the document it had to start with. You can see the demo of this technology in the RootsTech Sessions at Computer Assisted Indexing. Then you can go to the website and see how well it will transcribe your handwritten documents. Here is an example of what it did with my German marriage record. The colors indicate people, places, and events.

The program is capable of reading handwriting in a variety of languages including German, Cyrillic, Arabic, English, and many others. So this should help you with a variety of documents.

 
FamilySearch also provides a demonstration video that shows a more difficult example where the computer is able to recognize the handwriting and extract the information into a tree showing the relationships included in the document. You can view the video of this demonstration on their session page. I'm sorry about the poor quality screenshots but they are clipped from the YouTube video.

Previously, the team had been working on improving the computer's ability to recognize typed document. Many of those records are now available on FamilySearch. You can see an example of an indexed record here. This work was connected to the Zoning Project which I participated in several years ago. The Zoning Project identified parts of newspapers which included important genealogical information such as birth, death and marriages and marked them so the computer would be able to recognize individual pieces of information. I did a blog post on the Zoning Project back in 2017 which you can read here.

Why is this innovation important? Once the computer has sufficiently learned this process, it will be able to utilize cloud based processing to index more records in one day than a person could in their entire lifetime. Currently, there is a quality threshold that has to be met before these computer assisted indexing projects are sent to the FamilySearch collections. Here is an example of a Spanish language church record that the computer indexed. Soon, you will begin to notice more records being indexed by computer. You will be able to identify those records since they have a blue box stating that the record was indexed by a computer. These records also have the capability for the user to edit mistakes.

Not only will this increase the number of searchable records but it will also allow you to request computer assisted indexing on demand for unindexed records. That means that any unindexed images (80% of all images are currently unindexed) that you find can be indexed on demand. There will be a button on the screen that will index the record and provide the record for you to review and edit. Eventually, as images are acquired they will be indexed y computers and then put online within a short period of time.

Innovations such as these will greatly increase our capability to be successful in our research.

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.