On Friday, March 4, FamilySearch announced the Get Involved volunteer experience, which can be accessed in a new mobile app and on FamilySearch.org. A tab at the top of the website titled Get Involved now appears where the Indexing tab used to be.

“But indexing is not going away,” said Ty Davies, a FamilySearch portfolio director who oversees the development of records. “It’s becoming part of this Get Involved piece.”

Get Involved had a limited release in Latin America in December — the experience is called Participa in Spanish. More languages are expected in coming months.

As more and more people worldwide want to connect and find their ancestors, FamilySearch is introducing Get Involved to help people have more personal discoveries in their family history. Reviewing a name on a record that was indexed by handwriting recognition artificial intelligence is one task that can be done with Get Involved.

You can learn more in a video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfIxO3RQGFU.

The following is a Plus Edition article written by and copyright by Dick Eastman. 

NOTE: This article is off-topic. That is, it does not concern anything to do with genealogy, DNA, or related topics normally found in this newsletter. However, I suspect that many newsletter readers will be interested in this article for many different purposes:

A new buzzword is becoming popular in high tech. Well, it isn't really a new buzzWORD as much as it is a buzzABBREVIATION (if there is such a thing).

According to Wikipedia's definition of IPFS:

"The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a protocol and peer-to-peer network for storing and sharing data in a distributed file system. IPFS uses content-addressing to uniquely identify each file in a global namespace connecting all computing devices."

While that explanation is technically correct, I think it deserves a bit more explanation. I prefer the explanation offered on IPFS.com:

"A peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol designed to preserve and grow humanity's knowledge by making the web upgradeable, resilient, and more open.""

Even that is a bit cryptic. I would prefer:

"IPFS is the next iteration of cloud computing.'

Another simplistic explanation might be: "The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a protocol and peer-to-peer network for storing and sharing data in a distributed file system."

The remainder of this article is reserved for Plus Edition subscribers only. If you have a Plus Edition subscription, you may read the full article at: https://eogn.com/(*)-Plus-Edition-News-Articles/12640127. 

If you are not yet a Plus Edition subscriber, you can learn more about such subscriptions and even upgrade to a Plus Edition subscription immediately at https://eogn.com/page-18077. 

At RootsTech, MyHeritage announced the new Live Story, a new means of adding stories to your family tree in a manner that looks like (and sounds like) your ancestor is speaking... LIVE! I wrote about this in yesterday's newsletter at https://eogn.com/page-18080/12638302.

Trying to properly describe a new video product in a text-based description is challenging, to say the least. Luckily, MyHeritage has now released a video that shows Live Story in action.

The incredible Live Story feature from MyHeritage takes the facts and photos in your tree and transforms them into an animated video of an ancestor telling his or her own life story. In the video, Tal Erlichman, Director of Product Management at MyHeritage, introduces this futuristic feature and shows you how to use it to give voice to your ancestors' stories.

You can watch the video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBwr-DO63vI&t=46s.

The following announcement was written by TheGenealogist:

For the first time, researchers will now be able to see more accurately where their ancestor’s house was situated on maps down to house, street or parish level, giving more detail than ever before.

J R R Tolkien recorded in 1939 Oxford displayed on Bing Satellite map

TheGenealogist.co.uk has also added over 258,000 new records that have now been officially opened. Now you can use TheGenealogist’s SmartSearch on even more records in the 1939 Register to discover where your ancestors were living.

Film star Leslie Howard’s house in Surrey shown on a historical map

With the addition of the more precise mapping feature there are some very compelling reasons to search the 1939 Register on TheGenealogist. Firstly it benefits from their unique and powerful search tools and SmartSearch technology. This offers a hugely flexible way to look for your ancestors as the authorities scrambled in 1939 to issue identity cards and ration books for the population.

Secondly, searching the 1939 Register on TheGenealogist allows researchers to take advantage of some powerful search tools to break down brick walls. For example there is the ability to find ancestors in 1939 by using keywords, such as the individual’s occupation or their date of birth. Researchers on TheGenealogist may also search for an address and then jump straight to the household or, if you are struggling to find a family, you can even search using as many of their forenames as you know.

With a record found in the 1939 Register, TheGenealogist then gives you the ability to click on the street name to view all the residents in the road. This feature can be used to potentially discover relatives living in the area and can therefore boost your research with just a click.

The 1939 Register on TheGenealogist also benefits from innovative SmartSearch technology that enables you to discover even more about a person by linking to their Birth, Marriage and Death records.

The 1939 Register, when linked to a more detailed mapping tool than ever before, is a fantastic resource for family historians searching for where forebears lived in September 1939.

See TheGenealogist’s article:Powerful mapping linked to 1939 Register pinpoints ancestor’s households https://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/featuredarticles/2022/powerful-mapping-linked-to-1939-register-pinpoints-ancestors-households-1520/

About TheGenealogist

TheGenealogist is an award-winning online family history website, who put a wealth of information at the fingertips of family historians. Their approach is to bring hard to use physical records to life online with easy to use interfaces such as their Tithe and newly released Lloyd George Domesday collections.

TheGenealogist’s innovative SmartSearch technology links records together to help you find your ancestors more easily. TheGenealogist is one of the leading providers of online family history records. Along with the standard Birth, Marriage, Death and Census records, they also have significant collections of Parish and Nonconformist records, PCC Will Records, Irish Records, Military records, Occupations, Newspaper record collections amongst many others.

TheGenealogist uses the latest technology to help you bring your family history to life. Use TheGenealogist to find your ancestors today!

The following announcement was written by Findmypast:

If you were unable to attend RootsTech 2022's opening sessions yesterday, you can watch a video of a keynote session featuring Palestinian-American comedian, Maysoon Zayid, and Stranger Things actor, Matthew Modine, as they shared their stories as keynotes on the Main Stage. Listen to Maysoon speak to the importance of equality and the power of comedy. Also hear Matthew Modine share the importance of story-telling. All this is available as a video at https://bit.ly/36QhkUb.

If you were unable to attend RootsTech 2022's opening sessions yesterday, you can watch a video of Ancestry.com's presentation featuring Crista Cowan (also known as The Barefoot Genealogist) at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lT-6h2jQIdE

If you were unable to attend RootsTech 2022's opening sessions earlier today, you can watch a video of MyHeritage's (one of the Keynote sessions) presentation at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sz3mlg31sw

If you were unable to attend RootsTech 2022's opening session earlier today, you can watch a video of it at: https://bit.ly/3pwYoQL

FamilySearch CEO, Steve Rockwood, and French-American bread-maker, Apollonia Poilâne, share their stories as keynotes on the Main Stage. Join us to hear about Apollonia's experience taking over her grandfather's world-famous bakery, and Steve speaking to the importance of Choosing Connection.

The following is a press release written by Ancestry.com:

LEHI, Utah--Taking photos and attaching them to a family tree on Ancestry can help people preserve images and memories, help connect family members with information they would never have found otherwise, and build ​​deeper connections with loved ones. That’s why Ancestry®, the global leader in family history, today announced its exclusive partnership with media preservation and archiving specialist company Photomyne.

By integrating Photomyne’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) based technology, Ancestry customers will get an even easier way for family historians to digitize old family photo albums, by scanning and uploading multiple photographs at once through the Ancestry mobile app.

“Almost everyone has a shoebox filled with old family photos and albums that sit on a top shelf in their closet. The problem with that is that no one sees or shares them and they are often forgotten,” said Heather Friedland, Chief Product Officer at Ancestry. “With the Photomyne technology integrated into the Ancestry mobile app, you can now easily and quickly scan full pages of multiple images from your photo albums at once and with a click, have them automatically digitized and saved to Ancestry. Uploading your photos to Ancestry ensures your family memories are preserved and your family’s stories will be cherished for generations.”

Unlike other scanning tools, Photomyne’s AI technology uses the phone’s processor and their proprietary algorithms to:

Auto-detect image boundaries and auto-crop photos

Scan multiple images from one page and split into individual images

Enhance and restore the quality of images

“They say a picture is worth a thousand words and photos are more valuable now than ever with the rise of user generated content,” said Photomyne CEO Nir Tzemah. “We are excited to be able to give the Ancestry community an even easier way to upload, scan, enhance and share priceless family images and memories.”

Ancestry customers will now also be able to upload and share images of photo albums previously added to Ancestry and apply the same auto-cropping, rotation, and image enhancement.

Beginning today, anyone can get started by downloading the Ancestry app and creating a free account.

Be part of the conversation and share your images and family history discoveries using #MyAncestryStory or follow Ancestry on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Tik Tok.

About Ancestry

Ancestry®, the global leader in family history and consumer genomics, empowers journeys of personal discovery to enrich lives. With our unparalleled collection of more than 30 billion records, over 3 million subscribers and over 20 million people in our growing DNA network, customers can discover their family story and gain a new level of understanding about their lives. For over 30 years, we’ve built trusted relationships with millions of people who have chosen us as the platform for discovering, preserving and sharing the most important information about themselves and their families.

About Photomyne

Photomyne facilitates the way people around the world save, share, and enjoy their life memories by harnessing the power of AI technology to bridge between the past, present, and future of one’s personal legacy. Using cloud-supported services for its iOS and Android applications, Photomyne leverages its original, unprecedented technology to provide tools for digitizing and managing all types of old (analog) and new media. It is offered in 16 languages and is used in 200 countries around the world. Photomyne is headquartered in Tel Aviv. For more information, please visit photomyne.com.