Welcome to my RootsTech 2023 recap for Thursday, March 2, 2023. I attended RootsTech virtually this year. Many of my genealogy friends attended in-person and from their social media posts it looks like they had a lot of fun at RootsTech, which is awesome! From my experience attending RootsTech in-person in the past, there really is a feeling of energy and excitement at RootsTech when attending in-person.
Before RootsTech began I looked through the class sessions that would be available for us virtual attendees and then created my Show Planner, or as it is called on the RootsTech website, My Playlist. The RootsTech app refers to my playlist as My Show Planner.
During RootsTech I shared my posts about RootsTech on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram instead of here on my blog. So now I will be sharing my experience attending RootsTech virtually here on my blog. I'll be sharing three recaps, one for each day of RootsTech 2023.
Thursday, March 2, 2023
My first class session on Thursday morning was "What's New at FamilySearch in 2023" presented by Craig Miller. Some of the things I learned from that class were these amazing statistics about FamilySearch: There are 1.47 billion persons in the FamilySearch Family Tree, 2.6 billion total sources, 83 million total memories, 8.9 billion searchable names in records, 4.6 billion historical record images, and 1 billion new record images published in 2022. Wow! One of the sneak peaks for the future that intrigued me is the "Shared Family Trees" feature that will be within Family Groups. With this new feature, we will be able to work on our family tree collaboratively with others in our Family Group. To learn more about this upcoming feature, and more from this class, click HERE.
Next up for me was the General Session which included the very talented Jordin Sparks. She said that her family helped her keep her feet on the ground and her head screwed on straight. And that her family brings her back to center. And can I just say how amazing her voice is! Wow! What a treat to hear her sing at RootsTech!
Can I also say a word about the wonderful emcee for the RootsTech General Sessions? His name is Kirby Heyborne and he was such a great emcee! He was so fun and did a fantastic job. To learn more about him, click HERE.
The next class session I watched was "1950 Census Secrets" by Lisa Louise Cooke. Unfortunately, inclement weather where she lives caused a power outage and her class was cancelled part way through. But one thing I learned from her abbreviated class is that Ancestry, FamilySearch, MyHeritage, and the NARA each have a different version of the 1950 census index. That's quite helpful because if we can't find our ancestor in one of these indexes, we should search the other indexes.
I also watched the Innovation and Tech Forum 2023, or at least part of it. One of the company's presenting in this forum was MyHeritage. Maya Lerner from MyHeritage spoke about their new AI Time Machine. I've tried this feature and it is very fun. Using Artificial Intelligence (AI), MyHeritage creates "imaginary images of a person, as he or she may have looked in different periods throughout history." Here is one of my 1950s Chic photos using MyHeritage's AI Time Machine. If you'd like to give the AI Time Machine a try, click HERE.
My next class session was "What's New at Ancestry in 2023" presented by Crista Cowan. She did a fantastic job with her presentation. One thing Crista pointed out was the comparison of time it took Ancestry to index the 1940 census versus the 1950 census. It took nine months to index the 1940 census and only took nine days to index the 1950 census using AI and handwriting recognition technology. Wow! A new feature on Ancestry is group messaging in the message center. Another new feature in the message center is the ability to archive messages. An upcoming feature on Ancestry is Info Request. So watch for that. A new and exciting feature is called Storymaker Studio. This feature is included in the Ancestry App. Storymaker Studio will allow us to "enhance photos," "capture audio," and "craft and share stories." To learn more about this new feature, click HERE.
My last class session of the day was "An Overview of Recent MyHeritage Photo Feature Releases" presented by Tal Erlichman. The AI Time Machine was discussed, which I already shared information about here in this post. Another feature that was discussed is the list view option for viewing photos uploaded on MyHeritage. Here is a screenshot of some of my photos on MyHeritage using the list view option. The red arrow is pointing to the list view icon. The icon next to list view is grid view.
Enjoyed your recap! I was also a virtual attendee, at some of the same sessions as you. Lisa Louise Cooke's tip about the 1950 US Census being indexed differently by the major sites also applies to other US Census indexes. I've often found ancestors on, let's say, MyHeritage that I couldn't find on Ancestry because of different transcription and indexing. You're rocking that 1950s AI portrait by the way!
ReplyDeleteExcellent recap Jana. I was able to attend in person and enjoyed it so much. I hope you will be there in person next year, so that we can sit and chat a bit.
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