patientgenie

 It's that time of year again - and three years since the last face to face event combining genealogy, technology and innovation at Salt Lake City. RootsTech 2023 There is a huge virtual component - so wherever you are you can access the virtual exhibition hall and many of the presentations . Or head to the RootsTech home page  https://www.familysearch.org/rootstech/ Lots of snow still on the ground - so much cooler than Sydney! Apart from imagining flying across the planet to attend in person and experience the change in seasons, there are things you can prepare for if you haven't already. Download the new RootsTech app Build your online playlist for watching live and on demand - many of the sessions are pre-recorded and you have a long time after the event to watch these. The new app for Android or iOS - search for RootsTech2023. The links to watch the live sessions are within the Classes area - you can use the "Type" filter to find Live Webinars. My recommendati

When some of us were sleeping on the night of Wednesday 13th/Thursday 14th April 2022 - Ancestry rolled out an update to our Ethnicity results. We get updates every now and then, my last one was September 2021 and before that July 2020. As science and technology advances, the information a service can provide us changes. So most of us are used to this change and getting updates from all the DNA companies about our Ethnicity. But this one comes with steak knives, you know those wait there is more adverts? The more   you will be finding along with this Ethnicity update is called SideView™ technology , showing us our ‘ethnicity inheritance’ . Here is what mine looks like. This new technology gives Ancestry scientists an ability to show us which side of our family our Ethnicity Regions came from, without having tested our parents: Don't forget to scroll down and because it is the first time - remember to read the help information in the right hand panel: My Dad came from South East En

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 y

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

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

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 might