RootsTech 2019 - Tuesday - 26 February

Do you know what RootsTech is? Have you attended a RootsTech Conference in the past? RootsTech is the largest genealogy conference in the world, held in Salt Lake City, the mecca for genealogy. They are expecting over 14,000 people per day to attend. The conference runs for four days, from Wednesday, February 27 until Saturday, March 2 and today was the day of preparations for many of us.

View flying over the Rocky Mountains

So, what was today like? Well, for me it consisted of flying from Orlando to Salt Lake City. I left my home at 4am, boarded my flight in Orlando and spent the next 4 1/2 hours in the air. The flight was great, there was almost no turbulence, and we even arrived 25 minutes early.

Once I arrived, I boarded the UTA Trax which is a train line that runs throughout the city and to adjacent communities. This is one of the best metro lines I have used. It was less than a 10 minute ride from the airport right to my hotel.

After checking into the Plaza Hotel, I went across the road to the Salt Palace, where the conference will be held. They had early registration this year and it was seamless for me. I already had my name card which was sent to me earlier so all I had to do was pick up my bag, lanyard and speaker badge.

After registering, I decided to check out the room that I will be speaking at this year. My presentation is in room 155E at 3:00 on Saturday. That happens to be the last presentation session of the conference. I was surprised at the size of the rooms this year. They seem to be quite a bit larger than in previous years.

Room 155E where I will be speaking.

I walked around the Salt Palace for at least a half hour reacquainting myself with the layout and quickest route between classes. You need to know the layout so you can get to your preferred class. If you get lost you might miss out on that one class you really wanted to take.

One of the things many of us do at RootsTech is network. I had a meet-up planned for lunch for some of the members of the Second Life Genealogical Society. I am the current President of the organization and this is the only chance we get to bring us together and talk about our research. It was great getting back with some of them and meeting some for the first time in real life.

Julianne Trotter (FamilySearch) and me discussing indexing.

I also had an opportunity to meet up with Julianne Trotter from FamilySearch. She was one of the leads for the Zoning project that ran for awhile during 2017-2018. Zoning was a process where indexers selected newspaper articles related to birth, marriage and death events so they could be indexed later. We discussed where the project is now and also how to increase public interest in indexing more records. I mentioned one of the projects that I have been doing for several months which I call Genealogy on the Street. Each month I have been attending a local street market and setting up a genealogy booth where we do genealogy research for random people who come around. This has been a great success and has brought many new people into our Family History Center. I think we had a good discussion and it has made me think more seriously about some of the outreach plans I have been considering for the last couple years.

Now it is time to begin to relax, get things ready for tomorrow, and make sure I know which classes I want to attend. There will be a lot to do over the next couple days and I hope to be able to provide my readers with some insight on this conference and some helpful tips for their research.

FamilySearch Indexing - Zoning Pilot Project

Ok, I know what you are thinking - Why can't he write on a regular basis like all the other bloggers? The answer is - I don't know. I love to write but I seem to only be able to do it when I get inspired, and then sometimes when I am inspired I don't have the time to focus. So, a few weeks ago I was waiting for my wife in a parking lot, listening to NPR. The program that was on was from The Millennial Podcast titled Nothing to Lose. That show talked about how the host began her podcast and the challenges she faced trying to find her inspiration. It inspired me to think about writing again (that was over a month ago). I had some great ideas but then just never was able to allocate the time to seriously sit down and write. I thought about writing down my ideas, I had many, but that just passed by without being pursued. So, this week when I had a few free hours, I sat down and started a new pilot indexing project for FamilySearch called Zoning. This was a fun project where volunteers view newspaper pages and block out stories with marriage, birth and death information. In the first day I completed over 670 zones in newspapers from Raleigh, North Carolina. I decided that this would be a good story to provide since this such a new project.

So, let's discuss a bit about indexing to start with. Anyone can volunteer to index the records that have already been digitized. To learn more about indexing visit the FamilySearch Indexing webpage. The indexing projects are moving ahead and more records are being made searchable each month. With the success of the indexing program and the addition of more digitized images online there has been a decrease in the need for microfilms to be sent out. Additionally, the cost of copying microfilms has increased substantially over the years. Many of you have probably read that the Family History Library will stop sending out microfilm records at the end of this week (September 7, 2017). The reason they are ending the microfilm rental process is that many of the films are now available online and they believe almost all of them should be available over the next three years, around 2020. Just to point out the major accomplishments achieved already in digitizing microfilm records, think about the following:

• Almost all of the microfilms rented by patrons in the past 5 years have now been digitized.
• Over 1.5 million microfilms (1.5 billion images) are now available online.
• Microfilms are being digitized at the rate of 1,000 rolls per day.
• Images that have not been indexed are available in the FamilySearch Catalog.

So, why is Zoning important? Zoning serves as the first step in indexing newspaper records. The zoners highlight the regions of each newspaper page that contain marriage, birth and death information that will be useful in our family history research. There are sets of key words that the zoners look for such as adoption, birthday, anniversary, divorce, engagement, estate, obituary, probate, etc.

If you are interested in signing up for the Zoning pilot project click here. Once your request has been approved and you are signed up you can begin zoning.

FamilySearch Zoning Pilot Project - initial view

Each batch consists of five newspaper pages that may or may not contain important information. As you read the page, looking for the key words, you begin to note which articles are subject to zoning. Currently the only events that are being zoned are those that contain birth, marriage or death information. 

Page after it has been Zoned for marriage information

The page above has several articles pertaining to marriage events such as engagements, anniversaries, announcements and marriages. Marriage information is highlighted in orange and the areas in blue are stories that are stitched together over several columns.

Page after it has been Zoned for death information

The page above has several articles pertaining to deaths. These stories are highlighted in green. Also, if you look at the side bar there is a page with a large red X on it. That indicates that there are no stories with birth, marriage, or death information. The large black circles indicate that those pages have been zoned.

Once you have zoned all the pages you can submit them and go on to zone more batches. This project is important for future indexing in that it provides the articles which will be added to the newspaper records.

I know some people have been having trouble indexing records, either because of the difficulty reading them or because of other reasons. This Zoning pilot project is an easy way for those who are having trouble contributing to the Indexing project to provide new records to the FamilySearch records.