RootsTech 2022 - Day 1 - Pace Yourself

RootsTech is finally here. Some may have noticed that it actually started last night for those in the US. That was done so that others around the world would be able to start viewing sessions on March 3rd their time. Actually, there are several start times for RootsTech that people may not realize. The first was the soft release at 10:00pm EST March 2nd for pre-recorded sessions. The second was the Archives and Records Custodians Symposium which started at 8:00am EST this morning. At 10:00am EST the Expo Hall has their preview. The first General Session officially opening RootsTech 2022 is at 12:00pm EST.

There are so many things to do at RootsTech that you need to find a way to pace yourself. One thing to remember is that the pre-recorded sessions will be available after RootsTech is over. You can still view many of the sessions from 2021. What is the benefit of watching these sessions during RootsTech? One major benefit is that you can chat with the speaker during RootsTech. The chat will remain for a period of time after March 5th but you probably will not be able to chat with them several months from now. However, many of the speakers have provided their contact information in their presentation or handout and you can contact them that way if you have questions.

Many of the live sessions will also be recorded and available afterwards. You can tell if it is being recorded by reading the session description. Look at their schedule and see which ones fit into your time. If it is inconvenient for you to watch live you can come back and watch it later but you will miss the live real time interaction and questions.

All of the Keynote speakers were previously recorded and will be available on demand. But you may want to watch them live to experience the excitement of RootsTech.

There are some important pages at RootsTech that you should keep track of:

• Home Page - highlights various classes and live sessions - https://www.familysearch.org/rootstech/home
• Calendar - includes the Main Stage, Live Session, and Product Demos - https://www.familysearch.org/rootstech/calendar 
• Sessions - list of 2021 and 2022 pre-recorded classes - https://www.familysearch.org/rootstech/search
• Relatives At RootsTech - list of the attendees that you are related to - https://www.familysearch.org/en/connect

My major piece of advice is to take your time, watch what you are interested in, chat with presenters and other attendees, and remember to have fun.

I will be adding posts about what I am doing and what I have learned during RootsTech so keep an eye on this spot for more to come.

RootsTech 2022 - 5 Days To Go

There are only 5 days until the start of RootsTech 2022 on March 3rd. Have you registered? Registration is FREE and easy, just visit the RootsTech website, enter your name, how you would like to receive updates and then hit the Register button. That is all you have to do to join the world's largest genealogy conference with over 557,000 participants registered as of February 24th..  

So, what can you expect from RootsTech?

1. Most of the presentations from RootsTech 2021 will be available for you to watch.
2. Approximately 700 new presentations from 360 presenters will be available for RootsTech 2022.
3. More than 600 demos and classes will be available in the Expo Hall.
4. There will be 53 class series (2-3 related classes which build upon each other).
5. There will be 60 live sessions that you can join and participate in the discussion. A calendar of all the live events can be found at this website.
6. The Expo Hall will have nealry 100 exhibitors' booths. You can visit each one, talk with the exhibitors, and see if they have any special deals available for RootsTech participants. The Expo Hall will open at 10am Eastern on March 3rd.
7. 11 companies will participate in the Innovators Portal which will begin Friday, March 4th at noon Eastern.
8. March 3rd and 4th will be the Archives and Record Custodian (ARC) Symposium. The ARC Symposium will have 5 live speakers, 15 round table discussions, and a variety of pre-recorded sessions. Information on the ARC Symposium will be available on March 3.

That sound like a lot, but don't worry, some of the content, including the RootsTech 2021 and 2022 presentations, will remain online after the end of RootsTech. So you may want to focus your viewing on the sessiosn that will not be availabe after March 5th, such as the live discussions, Expo Hall events, ARC Symposium, and Keynote Speakers.

In my January 23rd blog post, I mentioned three of the Keynote Speakers - Diego Torres, Matthew Modine, and Apollonia Poilâne. But now we know the rest of the Keynote Speakers that will be at RootsTech and we know the schedule for their presentations.

• Thursday, March 3rd, at noon Eastern, RootsTech will be opened by Steve Rockwood, CEO of FamilySearch. He will be followed by Apollonia Poilâne.
• Thursday, March 3rd, at 10pm Eastern, Maysoon Zayid and  Matthew Modine will be telling their stories.
• Friday, March 4th, at 4pm Eastern, Diego Torres and Thaís Pacholek will tell their stories.
• Saturday, March 5th, at noon Eastern, Molly Yeh and Azumah Nelson will tell their stories.

You may not be familiar will all of these names since they represent cultures from across the globe. But you can find more information about each one on the FamilySearch Blog as you click on their names.

So, how international is RootsTech? You can tell the international influence by looking at the approximately 700 presentations that will take place. These presentations include 255 about North America, 174 about Asia, 164 about Europe and Latin America, 33 about the Pacific, 27 about Eastern Europe, 17 about Africa, and 9 about the Middle East. Classes will be available in 30 languages and will have live translations through YouTube so you can watch presentations from speakers across the globe. RootsTech will also be broadcast on television in Africa (5 channels) and the Philippines (2 channels) for those who may not have reliable internet access.

How many cousins do you have around the world? RootsTech participants can see if they are related to any of the others registered for the conference. The new Relatives at RootsTech application lets you see who they are, where they are from, how you are related, and you can also leave them a message. Check to see how many people you are related to. Currently, I have 80 cousins on the list but I always have low numbers compared to everyone else.

And the RootsTech Store is open so you can get all of your RootsTech swag. Everyone needs a RootsTech t-shirt, or how about a mug.

There are so many things that you can do at RootsTech but you will need to know how to navigate the RootsTech website. Lucky for you RootsTech has a blog post to help you find your way through the website and help you select the classes and presentations that you are looking for.

Don't miss out on RootsTech this year. Take the opportunity to attend classes, meet thevendors, discover new cousins, and network with the speakers and other attendees. It will be an incredible event.

RootsTech 2022 Preview

RootsTech 2022 is just over a month away and many of us are looking forward to overloading on the genealogy related speakers and events on March 3-5. The theme for the RootsTech conference this year is "Choose Connections". If you attended RootsTech 2021, you know that there were over 1 million people attending the virtual event and we were able to connect to our cousins using the app. Additionally, there were over 1,000 presentations which are still available for you learn from. 

As of earlier this week, there were over 90,000 people already registered for the virtual event and we have over 1,500 presentations being prepared for the conference. There will also be live panel discussions, keynote speakers, the expo hall where you can meet with various vendors and watch demonstrations of their products, and so much more. FamilySearch has been working all year to improve the experience over last year.

So, what can you expect? Several of the keynote speakers have already been announced. Since this is an international conference, many of the keynote speakers will not be as familiar to viewers in the United States. 

• On January 5th, Apollonia Poilâne was announced as a keynote speaker. Apollonia is a world renownd bread baker and author from Paris.
• On January 12th, Matthew Modine was announced as a keynote speaker. Matthew is an award-winning actor and activist. He has starred in Stranger Things, Full Metal Jacket, Jobs, and Birdy.
• On January 19th, Diego Torres was announced as a keynote speaker. Diego is an award-winning singer, songwriter, producer, musician, and actor from Argentina.  

So, what am I up to at RootsTech 2022? Quite a lot! On Saturday, March 5 from 2:00-3:00pm Eastern Time, I will be participating in a live panel discussion talking about how you can work on family history projects as a community. My portion of the discussion will focus on collecting and connecting WWII newspaper stories. The other panelists will discuss their experience with projects including the BYU Record Linking Labs Projects (Dr. Joe Price), The Bridge Forum Let's Do Good Together (Heather Jacobs), Historical Newspaper Indexing Project (Taneya Koonce), The Ogden Stockyards Project (Rachel Trotter), 21 Day Family Connections Experiment (Taralyn Parker), Connected Tempe Community Ancestry Project (Mckell Keeney), and the Tacoma - Pierce Records Project (Mary Anderson and Alisha Chang). As you can see, there are a lot of projects that will be discussed during this panel discussion. The discussion will be simulcast on Zoom and YouTube and we hope to have a chance to answer some of your questions.

I will also be presenting three recorded sessions. The sessions will be on how to research in the online archives for French, German, and Dutch records. Each session will have a detailed handout with links to the various archives and collections available in each archive. This will be a great resource for anyone who has links to these countries.

And finally (I think), I will also be participating in the Expo Hall representing The Family History Guide. The mission of The Family History Guide is to greatly increase the number of people actively involved in family history worldwide, and to make everyone's family history journey easier, more efficient, and more enjoyable. The Family History Guide is a great resource to learn or teach family history methodology and resources from. I invite you to take a look and explore the Guide to see what you might be missing in your research.

I hope you will take advantage of this opportunity and register for the FREE RootsTech 2022 conference. I know that I am taking time off from work in order to fully immerse myself in all of the resources that will be available from March 3-5. But many of the resources will be available afterwards for those who can't join us in person. Hope to see you there!

WWII Hometown Newspaper Collections Project

Good morning all and Happy Holidays! This year has been busy. I would have thought with the continuing Covid pandemic and working from home that things would have calmed down some but that isn't the case. Of course, much of what I am doing is working on my genealogy projects and helping others work on their projects. 

Earlier this month, on December 7, was the 80th anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the entrance of the United States into World War II. With the entrance into WWII, the lives of many people were changed. Young men were recruited into the armed forces. Parents said good bye to their sons, some forever. Employers had to find new ways to replace their workforce which introduced many more women into the work force. Our local newspapers chronicled many of these events in their daily or weekly columns. However, 80 years later, many of those events are dim memories for only a few living people and the more recent generations are not aware of all the sacrifices that their predecessors had to endure. It is time for them to learn about their ancestors' lives during WWII so they can understand more about how those events shaped a generation. The WWII Hometown Newspaper Collections Project is a grassroot project to begin chronicling those events in a way that the current generations can discover.

The WWII Hometown Newspaper Collections Project is a volunteer project where individuals or groups can document the individual sacrifices by collecting newspaper articles from the time and attaching them to the family tree on FamilySearch or by creating and publishing biographies of the individuals in those newspaper stories. Volunteers can select their hometown newspapers and discover stories about the local residents from WWII. I will be working on stories from The Minster Post in Minster, Ohio. The articles can be enlistments, promotions, service records, deaths, or any number of other related topics. Some volunteers may want to write something about the individuals. Examples of such stories can be found at my blog with biographies for 2nd Lieutenant Edwin Allen Rodheffer, Ensign Harry Francis Raterman, and Staff Sargent Edward Frederick Gaier. Others may just want to link the stories to the FamilySearch family tree. Whichever way you want to be involved is up to you, but either way will encourage others to learn more about the family members who served during WWII.

I hope that you will join me in this project and help to document how WWII was experienced on an individual level. Contact me if you would like to learn more about this project or join me at RootsTech Connect 2022 on March 3-5, 2022 where I will be talking about this project during a live session.

RootsTech Connect 2021 - Day 3 - Inspiration

It is already day 3 of RootsTech. By the way I do realize I am a day ahead of the official day counter but I believe RootsTech actually started on Wednesday with the opening of the Expo Hall. How can the days seem so long but the event seems so short. I hope everyone has had an opportunity to see the sessions they wanted to see, listen to the main stage events, visit the Expo Hall, and meet with others attending RootsTech.

Were you inspired by anything you have seen so far at RootsTech? Maybe some of the Main Stage speakers inspired you? Did you watch Nick Vujicic talk about his life as a handicapped child and how that molded his view of the world? Did you watch Francesco Lororo talk about rescuing the music scores written by prisoners in the concentration camps during WW II? Or maybe you saw Erick Avari talk about his life's journey from his childhood in India to an actor in the United States. These are just a few of the Keynote speakers that shared their inspiring stories. I encourage you to spend some time listening to their stories on the RootsTech Main Stage.

Have any of the presentations inspired you? The series of  Let's Do Good Together panels discussions were designed to inspire participants to take steps afterward to do good. The discussions that I was involved with yesterday provided ideas encouraging the use of family history in education and supporting community projects that included activities focused around family history. The panel I participated on today discussed ways to inspire children to love family history. There were other panel discussions which talked about improving the reach of DNA Interest Groups, discussion of projects in Texas, exploring the psychological benefits of family history, and learning about Search Angels for adoptees, along with a few other topics.

One of the panelists I met through the Let's Do Good Together discussions was Daniel from Ireland. He is a 17 year old who started his genealogy journey when he was 13. He helped moderate one of the breakout rooms in our discussion of Inspiring Children and Youth to Love Family History. What makes Daniel so inspiring? He has taken his love of genealogy and spread it across the globe through a group called The Hidden Branch. This is a group of young people ranging from the early teens to early twenties who all have a passion for genealogy. They provide help and inspiration for other young people to get involved in genealogy. So if you have a young person who shows an interest in family history, you may want to point them toward Daniel and his group.

Other panelists in groups with me were Shenley Puterbaugh from Inspire Family History and Olivia Jewell from the 21 Day Family Connections Experiment. The goal of Inspire Family History is to inspire children of all ages to love family history. They start with the concept that you are who you are because of the decisions and actions of those who came before you and that as you learn about your ancestors, you are better able to understand yourself. Their website has a great list of resources and ideas to promote getting children inspired about their own family history. 

The 21 Day Family Connections Experiment is a social experiment exploring the psychological benefits of daily connections with family past and present. They have developed a set of themed plans that last 7 to 21 days which encourage actions on a daily basis to help you explore all aspects of family connection. 

Both sites understand that knowledge of our family history promotes self confidence, resilience, a higher self esteem, a sense of place, and many other positive traits that help us cope with the world around us. Both of these women are working to inspire a new set of people to become interested in family history and promoting well being in our society.

These are just a few example of how attending RootsTech can be an inspiration to us. Take a look at their websites and watch their RootsTech videos to learn more and be inspired yourself. 

Shenley's RootsTech sessions are listed here. While Olivia's are listed here.

Family history should be inspiring. We should enjoy the work and want to encourage others to participate. It doesn't end with you and we all should be willing to share what we have discovered with our families so they understand their history and how the actions of our ancestors have shaped our own lives. Have fun and "Let's Do Good Together".

RootsTech Connect 2021 - Day 2 - Discovery

Day 2 of RootsTech is coming to an end. Today was a day of Discovery at RootsTech. I started out this morning working in The Family History Guide booth in the Expo Hall. The Expo Hall was a bit slow but we did get to talk to some people about what we do at The Family History Guide. I invite everyone to take some time over the next two days to visit the Expo Hall and chat with the people in the booth. We won't bite and we will be happy to have a conversation.

After that, I participated in two panel discussions and had a great time interacting with the participants. These programs are live and are not available after the conference. 

We just finished up the Family History and Genealogy in K12 Classrooms discussion. Our panel talked about our experience using family history as a teaching tool. I came at the topic as a homeschool parent who used family history in my child's education. I am also the Education Director at The Family History Guide where we develop programs to teach a variety of age groups. And lastly, I am involved in the Indian River Genealogical Society's youth outreach program. The other panel members had their own experiences that they were able to discuss. Our goal was to begin the discussion and encourage the participants to think of ways they can incorporate family history in their programs.

Before that, I was the moderator for the Connecting Your Communities in the FamilySearch Family Tree panel. This panel discussed ways people interested in family history could work with their communities to encourage family history related projects. Some panelists discussed their experience working with African-American cemetery projects. Others talked about collecting various records and adding them to FamilySearch. We had a good discussion and started a new Facebook group to further this discussion after RootsTech.

Tomorrow at 3:00pm EST, I will be on a panel discussing Inspiring Children and Youth to Love Family History. This will be another great opportunity to interact with people at RootsTech.

I also discovered a new photo tool at MyHeritage. This tool is called Deep Nostalgia. It is able to animate your photos by moving the head, eyes and mouth in a fairly realistic way. Several of my Facebook friends have been trying it out. You can see an example of how this works in the video below. It's a little Harry Potteresque, don't you think?

The great thing about this is that we had the original black & white image, which we colorized at MyHeritage, and then we were able to animate it. This brings a whole new layer to your photographs. Some people may not like it because it manipulates the original photographs integrity but I see it as a new way to appreciate the images we have of our ancestors.

What else did I do today? I spent some time talking with Todd Hansen of Story Trek fame. He has a new project called Todd Hansen's Legacy Story Project. This project helps you record your own story. They have a downloadable workbook which provides prompts to help you develop your story. Todd and his crew will record your story in your home, at their studio, virtually, or you can take Todd's online training to learn how to record your own life story and the stories of those you love. If you are familiar with Story Trek, you know that Todd believes everyone has a story to tell. He is there to help you tell your story.

So my theme for today was Discovery. Discover your passions to build community and educate youth through family history. Discover your ancestors through seeing their images in a new way. And discover yourself through your own life story. I encourage each of you to discover something new about yourself, your ancestors, and your community in the coming days.

I hope everyone has a great rest of the week at RootsTech. Get some sleep, stay hydrated, and most of all, learn how to tell the stories.

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.