My RootsTech 2013: Day 1 - FamilySearch reveals website beta and vision, BillionGraves tech plans

I guess most of all I am glad about the focus to beginners and pre-beginners. We need to share the joy of story, family, love, etc. Many of the "reveals" at the conference are "soft"and this added beginner emphasis is an important aspect of FamilySearch's vision.

With about an hour left until I head to the Mormon Tabernacle to listen to the choir, I hope to give a somewhat decent overview of highlights from my first day. With so much to do, everyone's experience will be different.

Favorite classes

• Genealogy Legislation with David Rencher
• Unconferencing with Dennis Brimhall

Favorite exhibit hall happenings

• Meet a few more enthusiasts who I previously only knew online: James Tanner, Dan Peay, John de Jong, Carol P., and several others who I spent less time with.

I was not as interested in some of the afternoon classes today so I spent a couple of the class periods in the exhibit hall collecting ribbons for my badge and meeting exhibitors. I did the card for entry to win an ipad, got my picture taken at both the FindMyPast and FamilySearch Indexing booth, and picked up two free family history charts, a t-shirt, took my photo in front of the BillionGraves booth to tweet as part of their contest, enjoyed a demo in a nice cushy sofa chair, and just loved the feeling of being with a bunch of wonderful people who love this stuff as much as I do.

What's new? This is subjective and biased by my opinion.

• FamilySearch reveals website overhaul (mobile friendly, additional LDS features, photos, stories, fan chart view...)
• BillionGraves anticipates My Legacy Memorial app to be available in the iOS store within days-weeks (in Apple approval now)
• BillionGraves working to use OCR on headstones to provide a draft transcript that transcribing volunteers can then correct (instead of transcribing from scratch) One of the staff at the booth told me.
• FamilySearch wants to reach out to those who don't use computers, reach out to youth, reach out to everyone. Only 8% of sponsor's members are registered for FamilySearch.org. Family history is more than genealogy, includes discovering self, talking to family (focus from CEO Dennis Brimhall)
• FamilySearch still working towards form and letter recognition (regarding FamilySearch Indexing), as well as availability in more languages. (No release date, but closer than last year. Some additional relationships with companies and organizations who can help them reach those goals.) Dennis Brimhall was the source for most of this.
• Lots of story sharing apps and tools

RootsTech 2012: My experience

Learn more about what RootsTech is at their official website.

You can also read my limited comments about 2011's RootsTech, which I attended online.

February 2nd was the first day of RootsTech in 2012. Each day I wrote only a simple comment in my journal such as: "Wonderful!" and "Another amazing day at RootsTech!." On February 6th, I wrote about my experience as follows:

2 Feb Thur: I was engrosed in the experience with over 4,000 people there. It was my first LARGE genealogy conference. The expo hall was crowded early on with lines formed at certain booths. I had a card marked at several booths & had it turned in for a free t-shirt. I saw people I recognized from the Internet all over the place. Bloggers, tweeters, Facebook users, professional genealogists, FamilySearch employees etc. At lunch I saw Randy Seaver of GeneaMusings blog and sat with him. To my surprise, he mentioned that in his blog post about the day. [link added] I was pleased to meet my "boss" at FamilySearch also, Janell Vasquez[--At the time I was volunteering with FamilySearch genealogy research community Facebook pages, and got a paid-internship doing the same thing in March]. I attended classes by Lexmark on multi-function printers being customized for FamilySearch, YouTubing your Family History, [I attended] 1/2 [of the class on] Evernote..., 1/2 Gamification--making genealogy feel like a game, attracting users, and multi-lanuage high speed indexing with a group from Hong Kong. [I was impressed by the Hong Kong group who employ hundred of people in a specialized facility, give their employees ping-pong speed training, and have implemented an impressive system. They do some of the indexing for sites like Ancestry.com, under contract.]

3 Feb, Friday: Josh Coates of Mozy gave an entertaining presentation on data storage space increasing. I went to a presentation about JQuery and indexed on the new Android FamilySearch Indexing App that I excitedly found out about in the morning when I saw someone using it in [while watching] the keynote speech. I met a BYU Provo family history student named Angela and sat with her at Josh's keynote talk. I skipped a class to index & walk the expo hall some more. Oh & Thursday night was a funny comedy show by Ryan Hamilton. I went to a class on the FamilySearch Family Tree REST API and enjoyed hearing about the open source GEDCOMX movement [link added]. I talked to people about the FamilySearch Genealogy Research Communities throughout the conference. I met admins Larri-Anne & Christa Klemme Friday. I talked about GRCs with Randy Whited of FGS [Federation of Genealogical Societies] [link added] yesterday & mentioned them in his brainstorming class for societies. Then I mentioned them in the Meet FamilySearch's CEO class & Janell Vasquez's boss Art Johnson thanksed me for my comments afterward. During the FGS brainstorm Joyce Homan Executive Director of The Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania recognized me as a PaHR-Access contributor and asked to get a picture with me.

The next day Saturday Feb. 4th was great too. I met a couple more admins such as Michael Melendez and Rick Koelz. Several of us admins had lunch together. Ancestry.com's keynote was exciting. They hav an amazing new census viewer and directory viewer. They made forward thinking comments about a semi-secret DNA project. Someday they say we will be able to determine an ancestor's town of origin from DNA. I was really excited about the new Indexing Linking tool FamilySearch has in closed beta. The BillionGraves [link added] presentation was fun too. There was a good class about advocating genealogy too. After lunch I spoke with Thomas MacEntee about FamilySearch Genealogy Research Communities and he offered to promote them by having us on his radio show[--we never got it lined up and his show has since discontinued]. 

That ends my RootsTech 2012 report as recorded in my journal. It was a very significant experience in education, networking, and preparing for my future career (and service) opportunities. Besides all that, one of my favorite parts of RootsTech 2012 was playing a game of pool in the middle of the expo hall.

RootsTech 2012 highlights in my other blog posts:
FamilySearch Indexing Android app
Announced yesterday at RootsTech: Check out "FamilySearch Indexing (Beta)" Android App.
From my post, "Happy Genealogists replace Angry Birds"

FamilySearch Indexing Linking
Last month, at RootsTech 2012, FamilySearch demoed their new FamilySearch Linking software. This program allows volunteers to link the pre-FamilySearch-Indexing indices to digital images. FamilySearch has had volunteers indexing records since the 1960s or so, but only recently has come out with the ability to link the actual digital images to the records on their website. To clarify: the "linking" is automatic for anything that has been indexed since 2006 with the FamilySearch Indexing software, but image linking is now being done for the older indices. This linking software is expected to remain in pilot until the end of the year. I requested access from FamilySearch--which you can do as well by contacting support@familysearch.org.
From my post, "FamilySearch Linking Demo"

It would be interesting to look at exactly what has and has not happened since some of the 2012 announcements, but I will leave that to future opportunity.

BillionGraves Review

BillionGraves consists of a website and smart phone app by AppTime, LLC.

Their goal is to get a billion graves (or more) put online.

The most successful venture in uploading headstone photos to date is Find A Grave with 66 million graves while BillionGraves only had about 50,000 graves two months past their launch.1

Find A Grave has been around for more than a decade. What makes BillionGraves think they can surpass 66 million? I don't know what makes each person think that, but I know why I think so. I've uploaded hundreds of grave images to Find A Grave so I am prepared to compare the services. I think BillionGraves has 2 keys to success.

1. Smart Phones
2. Crowd-sourcing transcriptions

What does a smart phone have to do with getting a billion graves?

1. Increased Speed of Photography - With the Motorola Atrix 4G smart phone I was able to photograph images more quickly than I could with either my DSLR or my 14 megapixel Kodak. 
2. The Phone's GPS Organizes Everything - It will put them in the correct cemetery and will GPS tag every photo's location exaclty. This feature is exciting for many reasons, such as keeping track of which headstones have been photographed already and helping descendents find the headstone should they want to visit in person. On Find A Grave you had to select which cemetery to upload your photos to after you took your camera home and transferred the photos to your computer.
3. Instant Uploading - If you have a good data plan, upload images while you are taking more pictures. The phone does it for you, just set it up under the settings tab of the app. If your data plan is an issue you can simply wait until you get to WiFi, start the process, and the phone does the rest. You can even save more time by having your phone auto-delete images that have been uploaded.

How will crowd-sourcing help?

Crowd-sourcing means that anyone can help with transcription. All you have to do is go to BillionGraves.com and click Transcribe. The online transcribing form is easy to use. With Find A Grave you could transcribe them yourself or... oh, that is the only option. Personally, I am good at taking lots of pictures, but I can only transcribe a little at a time. This feature lets people help how they want to. You can even choose to only transcribe or to only photograph graves. It is kind of like a FamilySearch Indexing for graves.

Join today!
BillionGraves is in its infancy, but it is growing fast. This month all users who upload 1,000 or more grave images will receive a free BillionGraves t-shirt. I finished the challenge this morning. Hurry. There are only ten days left.

Which phones does BillionGraves work with? - iPhones and select Android phones

1.  Gordon Clark of FamilySearch talks about the way services like BillionGraves will work with the FamilySearch Tree. He says BillionGraves has about 50,000 graves uploaded. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsVUWIaU2w4

BillionGraves' Goal
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We hope to provide an expansive family history database for records and images from the world’s cemeteries—but it’s not something we can do alone. We need you to help us by collecting images from your local cemeteries and transcribing the information those headstone images provide.

Help us make family history research more accessible to everyone. Take the BillionGraves.com iPhone/Android app with you when you go to the cemetery and contribute to the grave image database. Even if you don’t have the gadgets required to collect images for BillionGraves, you can still help build the database by transcribing the images so anyone, anywhere, can find ancestors’ graves with just a few clicks of the mouse.

BillionGraves.com vs. FindAGrave.com and Other Headstone Databases

BillionGraves.com, along with their geo-tagging smartphone app, is a promising start up.
FindAGrave.com is a mature giant.
Interment.net is a valiant pioneer.
US GenWeb Archives Tombstone Project shows the strength of a passionate community.

US GenWeb Archives Tombstone Project shows the strength of a passionate community.
The project varies greatly from one state to the next and from one county to the next because each such jurisdiction is designed to be run by a different volunteer. Photographs are generally submitted to the volunteer in charge of that jurisdiction who uploads and transcribes them. This puts an undue burden on each area's volunteer. When smaller amounts of photographs were coming in this burden felt manageable. Since the Tombstone Project began in 1997, the number of people submitting tombstone photos to the internet has increased sharply. Submitting them to someone else to do the transcription and uploading is especially desirable if you happen to have photographed an entire cemetery. In 2009, I photographed ten cemeteries for the US GenWeb Archive. After the county volunteer processed those first ten cemeteries, and I realized the burden it placed on her, I looked elsewhere for my future cemetery photography efforts.

Interment.net is a valiant pioneer.
Also begun in 1997, Interment.net appears to be the first website run by a small group of individuals--2 people in this case--accepting tombstone data for open publishing online. Though the website claims initial popularity and is still available to this day, one major drawback of Interment.net is its failure to host headstone photographs. Nevertheless, because it is a separately generated and maintained database it may still be worth checking. While it was an important pioneer in its day, I choose not to invest my volunteer efforts into this database.

FindAGrave.com is a mature giant.
Since 2000, when today's Find A Grave website went online, the site has become home to over 65 million individual grave records. FindAGrave.com has many perks which helped lead to its position as the most well known online headstone host. Find A Grave's most notable unique feature is the ability to request a photograph of a specific grave marker. Since 2005 I have been a member of Find A Grave, but it was not until this year (2011) that I took it as a serious volunteer opportunity. In a matter of a few months I uploaded over 500 photos and added more than 300 individual records. I made sure there were records for all my direct ancestors whose place of burial I could determine, and I added many of the records from the ten cemeteries I photographed for US GenWeb Archive. On Find A Grave you can add records without photographs, you can add as many records or photographs as your heart desires without waiting for someone else to upload your work. You can link individuals in family relationships, organize individuals into files called "virtual cemeteries," request edits on records managed by other individuals, etc. You are in control.

BillionGraves.com, along with their geo-tagging smartphone app, is a promising start up.
There are two major things, in my estimation, that set BillionGraves apart from Find A Grave. First, pictures are geo-coded for you and, second, you can either photograph or transcribe (you don't have to do both). This cuts down the volunteer time required from those who want to help. BillionGraves.com relies heavily on crowd-sourcing. The cool thing is you can easily make a big difference in just a few minutes with almost no preparation. If you happen to be traveling and feel like taking a refreshing walk outside, pull out your smartphone, and within minutes you can upload several photos of headstones directly to the site. You don't have to file them into the correct cemetery unless you found a cemetery that hasn't been added to the database yet, in which case you can easily add the name. GPS tagging does the organizational work for you. Don't worry about transcription. You can always do that on a rainy day. I just came up for an upgrade on my cell phone plan and the single biggest reason I decided to get a smartphone was so that I can use the geo-tagging feature of BillionGraves.com's new Android app.

RootsTech 2011 (watched online): My highlights

This post has been compiled long after the conference to highlight what I learned from RootsTech 2011. It will be more sparse than future years as I only viewed online content for the 2011 conference year. Unfortunately, the 2011 videos were removed from the video archive at RootsTech.org (presumably to save room and post the more recent year). Fortunately, some are still available through a page of the Middle Peninsula African-American Genealogical & Historical Society of Virginia (MPAAGHS).

The 2011 conference was held February 10-12th, although I believe I did not watch any until March 4th. I wrote in my journal that day that I watched a couple sessions, but I gave no comments. I did comment briefly in a couple blog posts that year. I was busy with many other genealogy and family things, though I distinctly remember being impressed. After 2011, I committed to attend in person.

Talk highlights
FamilySearch image viewer
Recently I spoke to Brian Pugh for more details on the HTML viewer he mentioned in his speech at RootsTech 2011. Going to any historic document you will see the document within what we call a viewer. There have been some good blog discussions lately about ways this viewer could be updated in the near future. Brian was able to tell me how to access the HTML version of the viewer. Simply remove "/show" from the URL in your browser's address bar and hit enter to load the image in the HTML viewer.

While functionality differences are not earth shattering in scope, it is fun to know there are 2 versions of the viewer online right now.
From my post, "FamilySearch Family Tree: Sneaking up on us?"

Interview highlights
11 Aug 2011 - Genealogy Gems Podcast YouTube Channel: Interviews with Genealogy Experts
There are several interviews available on this channel from RootsTech 2011 and a few from other conferences within the past few years. While each interview is "expert," the most memorable interview for me this week was "Family History and Mobile Strategies with Ty Hatch." This month I've been spending a lot of time exploring the new BillionGraves mobile app. This app uses crowd-sourcing to photograph and transcribe graves. A unique feature is the automatic geo-tagging. The BillionGraves apps were released in May and June this year. This interview with Ty Hatch, from 3 months earlier, discusses the genealogy mobile market and the need to use mobile technology such as geo-tagging.
From my post, "Highlights - August 2011"