What I learned from RootsTech 2012

I've spent many hours the past few days listening to the streaming sessions at Rootstech . I did the same last year. I've learned many new interesting things this year. You would think after spending many hours reading about genealogy, attending webinars, etc., there would be nothing new to learn. There are so many facets to the field of genealogy that there are endless new things to learn! The field of genealogy and technology is always changing, and will always change, so it's important to keep up to date on the changes, and new records available online. As Lisa Louise Cooke said in her Genealogy Poscasts session continuing education using podcasts, blogs, etc., is essential.

It's hard to pick a favorite session. They were all GREAT! Ron Tanner's session about the Family Search Tree was excellent, and really got me stoked up! At the end of it I felt like let's not stop with correcting Family Trees at Family Search.  Let's get millions of  people to correct EVERYTHING on the internet! A little too ambitious probably lol? So what about doing the same thing with the trees at Ancestry and Rootsweb? I have been correcting some the mistakes on my own Gedcom which is a modest step forward when it comes to cleaning out the rotten genealogy Fridge. 

Something I was thinking I would like to see on the internet is a central location where family bible pages can be shared. Something like find-a-grave for bibles would be great!

What I've learned

• I learned what Metes and bounds mean, finally lol!! “Typically the system uses physical features of the local geography” Wikipedia. I learned about mapping software for this too. Now I can attempt to map out my ancestors land.
• Do I trust the cloud? Session inspired me to actually start using drop box; which is now 19% full for my free account! 
• The One Note demonstration during the Idol competition encouraged me to take a look at that.
• Web searching is tricky . Try many search sites. I've had problems in the past when I've gone back to find something and it did not come back up in the search. I've also used the same phrases for years and get different results sometimes. I've found things that have been on the net for years but just came up in the search recently? So it's important to repeat searches often.
• Only 5% of web genealogy content is indexed.
• First 5 results in search are the most often clicked on.
• Large number of broken links a problem
• New GedcomX, to include links to other source material.

Using Google for genealogy

• Use tilde at end of words in search means find words like ~
• In image search upload a picture and click camera in image search to find pictures like it (see image above).
• You can click on black white color images only or just faces.
• Try google news again! It's not going away completely; new content is not being added now.
• Can save free google books as pdf or other formats to read later.
• Watch Google Genealogists videos for more tips.
• You can save and annotate maps using Google maps.
• There is a screen capture chrome extension.

Final Ancestry Panel Keynote

• DNA 100 errors in 6 billion genes.
• Computational genealogists work out interpretations of results.
• DNA integrated into records in future.
• Need to crack handwriting recognition to make these kinds of docs available for search.
• 12 percent of people using mobile devices at ancestry.com site (I was thinking how expensive accessing the web is this way, at least for me)

New Family Search Tree

• You will be able to contribute to it and make corrections.
• You will be able to add source images.
• You will be able to  remove old Gedcoms. Like Ron Tanner said you could not remove bad info in the past. I remember when I found errors in some of my earlier submissions I had to submit a new gedcom to correct it, and the bad info was also still there. Can't wait until I can remove my bad info!

Maybe next year they could get Leo Leporte out there! Would love to hear him speak there! http://twit.tv/