SOME THINGS I LEARNED AT ROOTSTECH 2012

2-4 Feb 2012, Salt Palace, Salt Lake City, Utah

©2012 by Donald R. Snow

This page was last updated 2012-02-17.
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These are not in any particular order and are only a few of the things I learned and, undoubtedly, other people learned many other things.  This is posted at  http://uvtagg.org/classes/dons/dons-classes.html  and may be used for any non-profit purpose, newsletter, etc., but please let me know if you do use it.  Thanks.  snowd@math.byu.edu .
  1. The entire RootsTech 2012 syllabus and program schedule is online at  http://www.rootstech.org  for anyone to look and/or download regardless of whether they attended the meeting or not. Those were posted 2 or 3 weeks before the meeting so attendees could look at and print off what they wanted, but it has also been available to everyone.  I think it's a very helpful thing for family history everywhere.  
  2. The keynote presentations and classes that were in the main lecture room all day long each day, Thursday through Saturday, were streamed live on the website and were recorded.  They are now posted there for anyone to watch.  Jay Verkler's keynote address on the first day about what's in the future for family history and technology was really spectacular.
  3. RootsTech 2013 will be 21-23 Mar 2013, so it will be 6 weeks later in the year than this year's meeting.
  4. Ancestry has several new things on their website, including some new search techniques.  On their census images they now have a way to put a colored background behind the entire family you want and a different color on the particular line of that family.  With that it is much easier to follow the entire census form across the page.  They have lots of other new stuff too.  See their notes.
  5. Dallan Quass of  http://www.werelate.org  has posted on his website a table of name variants, 200,000 for sunames and 70,000 for given names.  These help greatly in genealogy searching. He has already put it into operation on WeRelate and is asking people to fine-tune the list as they do searches, if they see names that shouldn't be in the list or know of others that should be. Anyone can download the table to use themselves. I think Dallan also has a place variant list, but I didn't attend that talk.
  6. Someone mentioned that all the talks were being recorded and would be posted along with the PowerPoint slides synchronized, but I didn't hear that officially.
  7. The class on Evernote discussed how it can be used for personal and family history uses and that it has some really helpful stuff.  Also, there are add-ons for browsers that are helpful for Evernote and many things, e.g. "Clarify" is an add-on that makes text from websites show up with better formatting so it is easier to read and copy and paste.  Do Google searches for Clarify for the browser you use.
  8. Barbara Renick's 19 pages of notes for her SnagIt workshop are posted and have lots of helpful information.  SnagIt is a very useful, but commercial, screen and video capture program.
  9. Fold3  http://www.fold3.com  says they have the largest collection of U.S. military records on the web.  Much of it can be searched and used for free. They had a half-price deal on their subscriptions for RootsTech attendees, but also said that since Ancestry now owns them, that anyone with an Ancestry subscription can get the half-price subscription to Fold3 at anytime.  On Fold3 there are Memorial pages set up already for millions of people, e.g. already for everyone in the Social Security Death Index, and you can set up others for free.  You can then add data, images, stories, etc., and link to the memorial page from anywhere else, including from (new) FamilySearch. Eventually, FamilySearch will allow us to upload images, etc., but not yet, so this makes a good way to post images and data now and put the link into nFS.
  10. There is a beta test of (new) FamilySearch going on right now to add sources and active links into nFS, but you have to be invited.
  11. Many of you are aware of the free 9-generation pedigree fan chart that Matt Misbach's TreeSeek company is providing with your FamilySearch data - go to  http://www.createfan.com  and log in with your LDS account to generate it.  You can view it and save off the pdf or have it printed in various ways.  Matt told me that you can do free 9-generation fan charts starting with other PID's by going to his http://www.treeseek.com , using your LDS account, and entering the starting PID in the box. 
  12. Darrin Lythgoe has just released version 9 of "The Next Generation" software  - http://www.tngsitebuilding.com .  It is a commercial program that makes web pages with your genealogy data for posting online, but the web pages can also just be run on your own computer to show your data in various ways.  It requires the free PHP which can be installed on your computer using a free download from http://www.wampserver.com/en/ .
  13. The Family History Library has a project of scanning FH books that you bring in.  See details on  http://books.familysearch.org/  and there are already over 40,000 FH books scanned and online there from the FHL, BYU Harold B. Lee Library, Allen County Public Library, Houston Public Library, and others.  To have a book scanned you must hold the copyright and give them permission or else it must be out of copyright so it can be posted online.  You take the book to the basement of the FHL and they will have it scanned for you in a couple of hours.  This is a major resource of FH data.
  14. MarkLogic  http://www.marklogic.com  has a program that organizes and searches large databases that are not in uniform format. It allows many different types of searches and updates the searches as new data is added to the database.  It is mainly for very large databases that companies want to be able to search.  The software is free and the program is free to use, if the database is smaller than 40 gigs.  I haven't tried it yet, but it may be just what I need for the text file database I have made of the personal letter collection of Erastus Snow and his family. We have about 300 family letters and that many more official and Church letters. The transcribed personal letter collection alone is several hundred single-spaced typed pages with combined file size of several gigs.  I am anxious to learn how to use the program to see if it is a good search tool for such a database.  It has proximity and other types of searches.
  15. The website  http://www.geni.com/  claims to be the world's largest family tree with 61 million profiles (names).  They have a basic plan that is free and two higher commercial levels which have more features.  Some of their information is free and they have projects that people are posting such as about the Mormon Battalion, the Nauvoo Legion, Early Mormon Pioneers, early Mormon leaders, and many others.  You can upload GEDCOM's, photos, and documents, and they have a facial recognition program that when you identify an ancestor in a photo it searches the rest of your photos to see if it can find other photos with that person.  There is a way that libraries and organizations can sign up so their members can use the Geni Public Access program free - see  http://www.geni.com/corp/geni-public-access-program/ - but I don't know what that includes. 
  16. Family history consultants could attend certain classes for free and those were all recorded and will be posted online at the Consultants Training website.  The schedule of FH Consultant talks is at  http://rootstech.org/trainingschedule and I think the Consultant website where the notes and videos will be posted is  https://www.familysearch.org/consultant/ .
  17. There was lots of information at the conference on mobile apps for FH with entire classes on apps for iPads, etc.
  18. FamilySearch is looking for lots of volunteers to index the 1940 U.S. Census as soon as it is released on 2 Apr 2012.  They estimate that it will take several months to do the indexing and are encouraging people to sign up at  https://familysearch.org/1940Census . There are already sites that help you find the 1940 Enumeration District, if you know the address, so you can find your people before the index is complete.  One of the talks was by Steve Morse who has written about 200 "One-Step" programs to search various websites or do various genealogy tasks, one of which is how to find the 1940 Census Enumeration Districts - see  http://stevemorse.org/ .
I learned lots more than this, but this is a start.  It was a good conference with something for everyone and we appreciate FamilySearch, BYU, and all the other sponsors spending their time, money, and efforts for us.
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