RootsTech 2022 #ChooseConnection

One of the things I look forward to at RootsTech is the new technology and tools that are released.

On a huge scale the various digitising companies are using machine learning to read handwriting - on those documents we love to get our hands on - we had the 1921 UK Census come out in January 2022 and no doubt my USA genie friends are looking forward to the 1950 USA census release later this month.

What about something closer to home?

Researching a number of unknown photographs that had belonged to my maternal grandmother, turned my casual interest in Family History into an addiction. I look back now and see how much I was striving to find connections within those photographs - and eventually to find someone other than my father whom I looked like.

I grew up as an only child of an adopted mother, living with my parents and my maternal grandmother in her family home. Sadly Grandma (Ada Irene Douglass nee King b 1884) died when I was 7 years old. My father had left his home in England years before I came along, I grew up affected by adoption, the tyranny of distance and being an only child due to the loss of my older brothers at birth. I now realise the combination of these disconnections from family, created a yearning for connection.

Over the years family history has brought me a wealth of relatives and friends around the English speaking world and now I feel more centred and in the right place at the right time. No wonder I call three places home! Australia, England and New Zealand.

On 21 February 2022 my father would have turned 97 and this year it will be 30 years since he died on Father's day (the first Sunday in September in Australia and NZ) so I posted the following photograph on Facebook as it is one of my favourite memories of Dad.

I can hear his voice and laughter and see the twinkle in his eyes. Sharing this image and my thoughts and feelings felt important, but I was amazed at the stories and memories others shared in the comments. Including a primary school friend's older brother - I had no idea he met my father! I could never had found out these precious memories if I hadn't shared this one photo.

So imagine my delight when my Ancestry App updated earlier this week - adding the #MyAncestryStory tool. Now I can create a slide show with up to 12 photos from my tree's media gallery - edit them, colourise and share them. The resulting personalised slide show will sit in the Life Story tab.

Today Fiona Brooker is hosting a live Recording Memories Workshop at RootsTech 2022 thought many of you might want to pop along and see what this new feature can do.

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The Wilson Collection, a new free New Zealand Index

Exciting to see this new free index called " The Wilson Collection " launched on 1 March 2021. Thanks must go to Diane Wilson and her "chocolate fish team" who have gathered information from a range of sources around New Zealand for more than forty years, and have decided to share it freely with us all via this website. Those of you that have heard my family history lectures over the years you will recognize my tips for the first time you visit any new site: SCROLL DOWN read THE WHOLE SCREEN move your mouse around to see which images are CLICKABLE find the HELP and read it So bearing in mind that many of you will click straight away on search , here are my three key tips: Search Tips once you have pressed on the Search Index link at the top of the home page 1. Scroll down and read the site help on searching 2. Scroll UP to see the index sources: Clicking on any topic will show the information about the individual indexes within this collection. For instance the NZ ...

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As new features roll out on websites, developers have to make room for changes, and what often happens is that rarely used features move or may even disappear. One of my favourite tools on the Ancestry home page for many years has been the Quick Links feature and the upgrade which is being rolled out is going to limit Quicks Links once the updated site is bedded down. So NOW is the time to think about this feature. If you already use it - it is time to review, if you have never used it - now is the time to check it out and see if you "wish you had known about it earlier" . This is the notice on the recently updated home page: Why use it? Quick links is a tool which directly takes you to specific Ancestry Datasets or Collections. I have a long list of specific data sets that I regularly use for UK, Australia and New Zealand as they rarely turn up near the top of any global search and require a bit of filtering to find. As I use many datasets for these countries on a regular ...

After RootsTech 2021

After the whirlwind that was this years RootsTech - with over 500,000 registrants, over 350 speakers and more than 1,000 videos online to watch via the Expo Hall as well as the Speakers area, we now have time on our side to watch and absorb. But how best to manage this? You can watch these presentations free via the RootsTech website until early 2022, but here is a tip to help more efficiently manage the ones you want to watch by using the tools within the YouTube environment, which not only shows what you have already watched, has additional tools under the Watch Later option. This is how a session looks within the RootsTech website There are a couple of things you can do from here Either 1) click on the Watch Later button in the top right and do this for all the videos on the RT site so that later you can come into your YouTube account and use the Watch Later menu to watch or reorganise the list into categories (ie: make playlists by topic or speaker). On a mobile device you m...

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