Rootstech 2022 - Choosing Connection as Ancestors Animated Portraits Now Can Speak Back to Us and Researchers Soon Get to Correct 1950 Census Name Handwriting Challenges

Rootstech 2022 was another resounding global success in its 2nd year being held entirely free and entirely online. My plans to attend as a presenter in 2019 as a presenter were derailed with the financial need to support NARA in the final few hundred hours of what ended up being 1,060+ hours I volunteered of overtime work to catch up the entire Fort Worth center on backlogs. I was delighted to return in the second year of the pandemic as a Social Media Influencer with our 10,00 wonderful members at Genedocs Templates via Facebook Groups. While millions of family researchers in all degrees of experience enjoyed this years three day event packed with a fantastic theme song about choosing connection, many great keynote speakers messages, 800+ new presentations in addition to access to all the 2021 offerings, much of the focus was understandably zoomed in on new technological offerings that influence our personal family photo collectons, what new ways the big three (FamilySearch, Ancestry, and MyHeritage) are each influencing the branches of our trees, and of course the 10 year long awaited release by NARA on 1 APR 2022 of one of our favorite and most used U.S. Records Collections in the genealogy realm.

As the 1950 Census is clearly the most anticipated records release this Spring, it certainly isn't the same old type of first day crash many of us witnessed in 2012 for the 1940 release. The biggest news tech-wise is that the at home time of many NARA folks was used to test and retest the new features of this massive 165TeraByte database
The most important feature will be researchers can use a new teted tool to submit corrections to names mistranscribed by the new Artificial Intelligence that scanned the handwritten entries of hundreds of thousands of enumerators nationwide on questionaires we all so greately love to peruse for just the right name. This is the first time researchers will have such an opportunity in U.S. history to quality review names of their relatives as they actually do their queries. The most dynamic new tools were clearly from MyHeritage with the Storytelling spoken option to the 2021 Animation of any ancestors animated portrait. We quickly learned we could edit each chapter of the spoken story, select from a fair variety of multiregional male and female voices of a fwe ages even, and that there is also a great timeline feature they are still working out some of the bugs on like missing death years for ancestors who we obviously had entered full dates for that should hve been extractable - it still provides a wonderfully useful view in the context of major global historical events and allows teh view to see clear overlap of lifetimes as well as what I call near misses that would have prevented us from even being here today. There are so many presentations, it is hared to pick a favorite in even the first month, but htat is why they will be available for a year, two, maybe three or more unless new technology makes them outdated so spend some quality free time viewing the key topics that interest you most and when you yearn for a new flavor, then try something completely new to you as well. They are usually 20 minutes to an hour to keep your attention and let you get up and move around between sessions, take a break, run an errand, etc. Most of us are prepping this week with the fastest ways to searhc out our ancestors ED#s based on their addresses for next Fridays big release which NARA say happens at 12:01 am on 1 APR this year to get an earlier start Genedocs members have my new filled in template to base their own off of and now you can to:

One more edit must add anoth3r column to this evolving 1950 Census Research Template thanks to Thomas MacEentee sharing how we can already search for Enumeration Districts at Ancestry in a beta version shared earlier today- Yay!