← The Genealogy Guys Podcast & Genealogy Connection
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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Welcome to episode 438 of the Genealogy Guys Podcast, the longest running genealogy podcast on the planet. I'm your host Drew Smith and together with co host George G. Morgan, we cover news, tips and solutions for the genealogist community. In this episode we bring you the tragic news of the courthouse fire in Rome, Floyd County, Georgia. We have the latest updates from Wikitree, Nathan, Dillon, Goodman, MyHeritage and FamilySearch. We share listener email about name changes and Scots Irish records. George and I discussed my recent trip to Salt Lake City for RootsTech 2026 and my upcoming trip to Sacramento for my all day presentation for the the Root Cellar Spring Seminar. The Genealogy Guys podcast is sponsored by my heritage and Roots magic. And now on with the show. Welcome to this episode of the Genealogy Guys Podcast and I am joined by my co host as always, George G. Morgan. George, how are you doing today?
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B
Greetings everyone. We know we've been absent for a while in our podcast, but there's been good reason behind that. Back in December, we were exploring new treatments for me for major, major depression. And we finally found a provider who has come up with what we believe is an effective, effective treatment. And so if you are curious to know more about that, you can send us an email@genealogyguysmail.com and we'll respond and let you know the details.
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A
But exactly.
- [02:00]
B
Thank you for your patience and for putting up with us.
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A
And we saw the comments that had been made in some of the groups where people have asked where we've been and people that when I said we would be back soon, there were a lot of supportive comments, a lot of enthusiastic comments and, and we do appreciate you all for having missed us. And again, we're glad to be back because we like doing this stuff.
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B
I guess we became a bad habit, Drew, because we've been doing this for over 20 years.
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A
Well, we have, we have. So. But we're glad and we got lots of stuff to talk about today. But there's some other bad news. George, why don't you get into that?
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B
Yeah, well, the news this week in Rome, Floyd County, Georgia has been devastating. The the old courthouse that was constructed in 1892 caught fire on Monday afternoon, the 23rd, at about 2:20pm the wind and the dry materials, the courthouse went up in flames and is just in terrible condition. The county officials have said that while their goal has been always to digitize as many things as possible and they have done a lot as if you're a researcher like I am who has family antecedents from the Rome, Georgia area. You'll know that a lot of records have been digitized and placed online at FamilySearch and MyHeritage and Ancestry and other sites. Unfortunately, there were paper documents that had not been digitized, and those are apparently a loss. The courthouse building that was. That was gutted by fire was being used for real estate, property tax activities, and for license registrations and, and plates for automobiles. And they've scrambled and they've. They've set up alternative space for. For the people to work there. And they were back in business on Thursday afternoon. The good news is that no one was hurt. Everyone was evacuated from the building. But I have to say, Drew, you know, I. I spent a long week In August of 1998 in Rome, Georgia, where my holder ancestors and my weatherly ancestors came from. And my mother was actually born in Rome, Georgia. And I'm so glad I was there and, and did the research at the time. It was a golden research trip for me. I learned so much, and I made so much in the way of stride. So I'm gonna give my recommendation to you. Don't procrastinate. You never can tell what's going to happen. We've all heard stories about records being lost or destroyed in courthouses and courthouse fires and other calamities. This just proves that it can still happen today and it is still critical. My heart is broken, and I feel diminished that a major historic part of the beautiful town of Rome, Georgia, has suffered this great damage. Yeah.
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A
And let's also learn a couple more lessons from this if we can, because obviously we can't bring back what has been lost as such. But your personal papers or anything that you've accumulated as a researcher, spend about 15 minutes a week digitizing anything that has not yet been digitized. Make sure you digitize it and that you back it up to the cloud so that if something were to happen, those are materials that you would not have to, you know, lose without having copies of. Also, talk to your local genealogy society or group. Are there collections that you know of in your local county or whatever county you do research in that have not been digitized that you can help in some way, Whether it's volunteering, whether it's writing letters to the city or county commissioners, whoever, to encourage them to make sure that all these materials have been scanned and put up somewhere archived and certainly backed up, because again, yes, you never know when something might happen that is completely out of your control, out of their control. And so it's a little easier to take. Yes, we won't have the architecture of the beautiful buildings that are lost, but it's even worse when we do lose the history. And so this is something I strongly encourage you to do both for yourself. Again, spend a little time each week and also look into make. Put that on your to do list is to talk to your fellow researchers for a particular county or area to see what needs to be done next. Yep.
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B
As I said, Drew, my, my heart's broken by this. Rome is a wonderful, beautiful town and I, I feel diminished by the loss of, of this wonderful part of history. And I know that the, the citizens of Rome, the Romans there are, are devastated as well. So we send nothing but, but warm wishes for recovery and wait for news about what happens to the old courthouse and the contents that may have survived.
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A
That's right. George, do you have something about Wikitree
- [08:36]
B
to share with us? Yeah, I do. Okay.
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A
Go to that.
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B
Yeah. Back in December, I was invited by the people at Wikitree to participate in the Wikitree Challenge. And what that is, is I uploaded my gedcom file and then Wikitree, which consists of. And I have stats here. WikiTree has 1,298,588 community volunteers with 43,915,679 ancestors and cousins on their tree, including a bunch over 15, almost 16 million of which have DNA connections. And it's all free. But Wikitree is undoubtedly the largest and most successful of the collaborative efforts to share information. And what they did in the Wikitree Challenge is, is I gave them my gedcom file and their volunteers took up the challenge for, for about a week. And they went off and they did their own research. And so they were filling in the blanks. They were rechecking my work. They found some discrepancies. They found lots of new information. And I, I was just absolutely thrilled. You talk about an early Christmas present, Drew. But I will put a link into the show notes for the, the reveal episode for Wikitree and you can listen yourself to, to the statements by people who volunteered and participated in that and some of the things that we found. It's, it's great, great, great idea. And if you are not involved in Wikitree, if you haven't investigated it, I strongly urge you to get out there at Wikitree and, and learn all about it.
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A
Absolutely. So one of our friends, Nathan Dylan Goodwin, has been a busy guy. He has come out with another book in his forensic genealogist series, the Hop Picker Murders. And I did get a chance to read it and just to share a little bit with you without of course giving away all the details. But it, I will, I will say this about it. I mean again, if you've ever read any of Nathan's previous books, Nathan is very much a student of history. He goes the extra mile to research the history of the areas that he is sharing and if it's occupations, how those work, and in this particular case the occupation were the hop pickers and those people that help pick the hops that you see are an ingredient in things like beer. So that's going to, goes into a lot of detail. Now I'm going to say if you're, you know, you may find that a bit overwhelming. This is a big piece of what this book is about is, is how the, the people engaged in this occupation and it was seasonal of course, because of the growth of the hops that it, the people that went into this. There was a, there's just a lot in there. So you might find it a little bit of a slog compared to some of his previous books just because there's a lot of historical detail there. But on the other hand, if you're interested in how your ancestors may have been involved in occupations like this and what were the, what were the agricultural details, then you may find that that's of interest to you. So again, this is Nathan Dylan Goodwin's most recent book, the Hop Picker Murders and it's out there on Amazon among other places. So just be aware of that.
- [12:52]
B
One of, one of the things I found as I was reading it is Nathan doesn't shy away from the use of terminology and, and jargon associated with the, the hop picking experience. And so, and that can be a little off putting. But I, I'll tell you, as always, Nathan has done a tremendous job with his research and with his storytelling.
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A
Absolutely. George, I think you're going to talk to us a little bit about something you're using on myheritage.
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B
Oh my goodness. My heritage. Myheritage keeps doing all sorts of incredible things. And at Rootstack, where you were in Salt Lake City recently, they made that later. Y. Yeah, they, they made a, a number of announcements but they have, they have included lots of, lots of new materials. First of all, they have released four major UK and Ireland record collections that are now live on myheritage, including rare passenger lists and non conformist vital records that open up entirely new paths for British and Irish family history research. So go take A look at that passenger list go from 1878 to 1960. And the non conformist births, baptisms, deaths and burials in England and Wales go back to the 1600s. So those are, those are very, very important. Yeah. We have other things from myheritage, but let's keep going.
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A
Oh, I think you were going to talk. I, I have my notes. You were going to talk about scribe AI.
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B
Well, I was, but that's actually, actually down a little ways.
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A
But that down a little ways on your list. We can come back to that.
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B
Yeah, I want to come, I want to come back to. That is very important.
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A
Okay, well that's fine. I mean I can, I have a few other items that relate to myheritage. I'm going to go ahead and share if I may. And the first one, I'm going to say bienvenido to our Spanish speaking listeners, particularly if you have ancestry from Spain. I think you're going to want to know about this. You know that myheritage has been doing having their own newspaper database called oldnews.com yeah. And, and they have just added from Spanish newspapers using their AI technology. They've collected have a new collection called Spain Names and Stories in newspapers. It is 285 million structured records that were extracted from these Spanish newspapers. So if you do have ancestors from Spain whose names may have appeared in the newspaper, you're going to want to take a look at that. That's pretty much a, that's a major thing. We're talking about full names, family relationships, occupations, places that were, that people lived or were connected to them, mentions of things that happened to them in the news. You'll get the newspaper titles when they were published and where they were published and there will be some article snippets and some AI generated summary with links to the scanned newspaper pages. So that is for any of you with actual Spanish ancestry that you've identified as from Spain. This is a big collection for you. So be aware of that. The other one just because again myheritage really is focuses on all the languages that researchers use every day that now they've added nine more languages to the languages that are available. And so we.
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B
They now have a total of 50 languages that they support in myheritage.
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A
That's correct, yeah. Can I add name the ones they've added? They've added Albanian, Basque, Bosnian, Georgiana, Icelandic, Irish, Luxembourgish, Maltese and Welsh. So yep. Okay, so that's my news from myheritage and not all. Well, I know. Well tell Tell us the rest of it, George.
- [17:52]
B
Okay. December 25th was a big month for historical records at MyHeritage. And they added 1.2 billion historical records across 27 new and updated collections from the U.S. england and Wales, Spain, France, Argentina, Uruguay and across Europe. Two of the newly added collections, if you're doing your research and go take a look at MyHeritage, because they have the England and Wales probate indexes from 1858 to 1995, and that goes beyond what's available everywhere else. And it indexes not only the individuals whose estates are being probated, but also additional relatives mentioned in the documents. So it's not just the main individual. And so this is a major advantage for tracing families through estates and beneficiaries. The other collection that really is important is the 1890 New York Police Census. This collection includes reconstructed household relationships not shown in the original images derived from address, surname, age and gender, making this rare census even more, more useful than before. So I think you, you are going to want to check that one out. And okay, as, as Drew had said, we have all these new languages that MyHeritage support. They also have, have added Sweden birth, marriage and death collections, and they are now complete on Myheritage. And these, this is a complete set of Sweden's historical birth, marriage and death collections ranging from 1850, they began, the births go to 1920, the marriages to 1945, and the deaths to 1945. So if you have Swedish ancestors, you are absolutely, positively going, want to go crazy in this collection. But, but the, the one thing that we've been holding back here, holding really good news until the end, is a new product from MyHeritage called Scribe AI. Now, we, we've all done become aware of artificial intelligence and the possibilities that it might add to our in depth research into family history records, remembering too that AI makes mistakes and all of the information needs to be rechecked and checked and checked for a reasonability. But they've added this new facility, Scribe AI, and it's pretty amazing. It allows you to upload documents, old family letters, records, photographs, some of whom contain valuable information. And because handwriting can be difficult to decipher, languages may be unfamiliar and images may lack context. Scribe AI overcomes these challenges by revealing important insights, providing historical background and suggesting next steps for the research. Now, Drew, as I told you, I think Ascribe AI is an absolutely essential tool for going through these documents. You, let's, let's put it this way. Take a, take an old family photograph and upload it and see what Scribe AI comes back and tells you. There are things that you necessarily might have overlooked in looking at that photograph. Same thing with documents, and especially the things that. The long legal documents that, that we all slog through. But this is very important. You know, caution is advised because, you know, the. The feature of Scribe AI is very addictive. And the genealogists that were given early access to the feature have become hooked. And I will admit to becoming one of those. It would be fair to say, Drew, that Scribe AI is one of the most important genealogical features that They've added to MyHeritage in the past few years. Now, the fact that artificial intelligence is being employed by the major database providers to do things like index census records and others, but they also are providing full text record research into specific documents or document groups. And these are. These are opening doorways to new scraps of information we never would have considered before. And I'm just, I'm. I'm thrilled.
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A
Yep, exactly. By the way, just speaking of looking at documents and noticing details that we might have missed, and I'm not going to give it away, George isn't either. We been watching a new British murder mystery series, but one of the points that was made was that someone found a birth certificate and supposedly for a baby that died within two to three days, but actually there was a notation on it that they suddenly noticed. It said adopt. Adopted. So again, that is why those, those are important. These little details can make all the difference in the world. And so just be aware that sometimes AI is a little bit better at noticing some things that we may have missed.
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B
Now, anybody can use Scribe AI for free on a limited number of images@myheritage.com Scribe AI with extended use available to subscribers. And. And I can't tell you of Another tool that MyHeritage has added that I've found as useful as this in recent years. So bravo to. To the MyHeritage team.
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A
Yep. So we're going to end the news segment with one of my favorites, which is always talking about what FamilySearch has been doing. They summarized their work in last year. Couple of things that is worth bringing up. The fact that they've got 22.7 billion searchable names and images in historical records. So that's enormous. They've got in the family tree there 163 million people, which includes. Or it grew by more than 163 million. Let me clarify that. But it now has 1.8 billion searchable people and they've added 400 people like us, contributors have added 467 million sources to those ancestors. So that's the, you know, part of the really good stuff. They also have a lot of digital books. They have, they've added 41,000 new books, which means you now have access to 655,000 free historical publication. They're full text, searchable. And they upgraded the FamilySearch catalog last year as well.
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B
Are these not, are these. Are the access to the content of that not restricted because of copyright?
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A
I believe so, yeah. I believe that those were available for searching, although, yes, you always have to check some of the materials that are online have, are restricted to a certain degree, depending on who you know, whether the material's still in copyright or, or whether the copyright holder has allowed for some of it to be available, but not all of it. Yeah, yeah.
- [26:43]
B
Some collections contain sensitive data and they aren't made readily available.
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A
Right. We're going to Talk more about RootsTech after the commercial break. But. And what my experience is, but I will share some statistics that were offered. This was actually for 2020 25, so not for 2026. But there were people joining from 235 countries and territories. There were more than 660,000 participants. And so again, this has been amazing in terms of just the amount of material. Let me move on to another point of what's going on with FamilySearch. And this one should not be a surprise. This is FamilySearch collaborating with America 250. And so those of you, whether you're in the United States or not, may know that the United states is celebrating 250th anniversary, the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of independence, this coming Fourth of July. And so FamilySearch is helping people, collecting stories from people about their families. And so they are, they are hoping to do a number of things. Some of the activities, there's a new webpage called FamilySearch America250. So you can see how people have been contributing to the story of the United States of America. And you can actually look to see what kind of experiences are going on and whether there's activities for youth groups and schools and community organizations and other things. So again, that it, it's really very much about sharing the stories of all the families that have come together in the last 250 years. So that's, that's a biggie. So, and then let me end this is from this, this actual month of in, in March, what new records have been added in March and That's always exciting. 30 million new records, 28 countries, including 21 million court registers from Ireland, 3.6 million public records from the US 2 million census and civil records from Italy and again records from Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Dominican Republic, England, France, Hungary and the Philippines. And so that's the summary there. Just to let you know that a lot of countries your ancestors are from, there are new records out there on FamilySearch.
- [29:24]
B
We hope that the, the announcements that we, that Drew makes about these, these new record collections being added. We hope you're, you're trying to keep track of this and we hope that your interest is piqued and causes you to go looking out there. Just remember the information on these, these online sites such as FamilySearch, MyHeritage, Ancestry, Find My Past and others. These are not static. New collections are being added. New functionality is being added. For instance, making handwritten documents full text searchable using artificial intelligence. You never can tell what new things you're going to find. So if you, I, I remember at one point in my life I thought, oh well, I'll be work working on researching my family history until I get back, you know, three generations. And I thought, yeah, right, that was, that was in, in 1961. My God, how many generations do we have now?
- [30:41]
A
That's right. With that, George, we are going to stop and take our commercial break. We love our sponsors and we want to make sure that we spend a little time talking about the sponsors. So when we come back, we have a little bit of listener email, although I will go ahead remind our listeners that if you have questions that you would like to bring to our attention or comments or resources or whatever you might want to share with the genealogy guys, please send that to genealogyguysmail.com we do look at your emails, but in the meanwhile we will take a little break, thank our sponsors during the break and then we will be back with some more information for you. So stay with us. MyHeritage offers so many different kinds of tools for genealogists. It's tough to know what to focus on. Certainly you can keep a copy of your family tree on MyHeritage and share it with your relatives. Or, or you can search for original records from the huge collections on MyHeritage. Or you can take a MyHeritage DNA test which now offers whole genome sequencing. Or you can subscribe to OldNews.com to find newspaper articles available nowhere else. Or you can use genie.com and work with a shared family tree with countless other users or you can decide that 2026 is the year that you learn more about genealogical research. So you subscribe to Family Tree webinars. Lots of choices. Which ones are the right ones for you? Go to MyHeritage.com and find out for yourself. I've said it before, but I'll say it again. Genealogists should have their primary family tree stored safely on their desktop computer where it can be backed up to the cloud. And the software that I recommend is RootsMagic. I use RootsMagic to keep track of my genealogical findings and then I export copies to other locations such as to Ancestry or MyHeritage. Right now until the end of April, I'm using RootsMagic to confirm my relationships to relatives at RootsTech, including a brand new one to my father's side of the family. I love the fact that I can quickly search for people already in my files and if I make additions or changes, RootsMagic asks me if I want to make a backup so I I don't have to worry about forgetting. And did I mention that you can use RootsMagic Essentials for free? Check it out at rootsmagic.com welcome back. We are back from our commercial break. We are going to share at least I have one email here, Georgia by May. This is from Judy and I did respond to Judy back in December, but I want to share the gist of it with everybody here. She's from Union County, New Jersey. She connected with a second cousin and basically Judy's paternal grandfather and this cousin's paternal grandmother. I'm sorry, I got that backwards. Her cousin's paternal grandfather and Judy's paternal grandmother were siblings and they never knew what happened to Uncle Arthur. That was the gentleman her actually Judy's dad's Uncle Arthur supposedly went to Florida to become a rum runner and so they think he may have died as a result of this profession. So they Judy gives his original name that he was born in New Jersey in 1902. She has a copy of the birth certificate. But there was a name change at some point in the 1930s. And Judy says I'm guessing it was not a legal name change. And he told the the new family that he was born in Tennessee. So she's asking how does she indicate his name change on ancestry? So we're going to talk for just a minute about name changes and how you indicate them and so forth. So let me share the what I wrote, Judy. I said, Judy, in most US States, there were no legal obligations to register a name change. I'm thinking that more restrictions might have gone into effect once people started to register for the Social Security system in the late 1930s, 30s. So you could go by any name you liked, unless you were trying to commit fraud or avoid prosecution. Now, regardless, let's say you're doing this on Ancestry. In a tree, ancestry lets you indicate more than one name for someone. When you're editing that person's profile, you can add a fact and choose the fact type of also known as. And then you can describe what the change was. So that is one way to do it. Now, you'll need to check with your software if you're not using Ancestry, but you're using, say, desktop software or another website for your family tree, look to see where there are places to indicate name facts, and usually there is some kind of a name fact, and you can then indicate those changes.
- [35:34]
B
George? Yeah, Drew, you had mentioned that name changes were not necessarily required to be registered legally. And that's really true. And I think most legislation, most laws say that you can use any name that, that you like, as long as there's, there's nothing illegal or criminal about it. Right? Y But let's, let's talk for a moment. Where do, where do we find, where do we find name changes that aren't legally recorded going back to the beginning of the 20th century? Think about immigration and naturalization records. Now, there is that, that dreadful myth that we keep trying to debunk that all the names were changed at Ellis island. And that's absolute trash. The people came off the ships. They had tags affixed to them by, by pins with numbers on them, and the numbers corresponded to the line number on the ship passenger list. So they were processed and brought in. Now, did names change? Well, it's possible that names changed at that moment in time, but that was not normally the case. I found one situation with a Swedish woman who came to this country in 1918 from Yoteborg, and she had her. Her maiden name was Udner O H D N E R that was her maiden name. Her married name was Johansen. J O H A N S S O N Going through the ship's passenger list looking for, for, for Hannah Odner or Hannah Johansen became really almost impossible. But I ended up searching for one of the sons, a son that came over at the same time, and finding him on a passenger list forced me to go back and, and pour through the passenger list itself and look for anyone else who might have been his mother. And sure enough, I found her. Now, remember that when the declaration of intention was done on your naturalization papers. They were checked against ship's passenger list, those applications. And so what they asked for was if. List your name as it appeared on the ship's passenger list. If it's changed from. From what it was on there, tell us what it was so that we can find you find your record of your physical arrival. And so that. That's an important place to look for name changes. You also can look in the naturalization files themselves for families and see what names were used.
- [39:18]
A
Yeah. And again, just to make sure we're crystal clear here, nothing involving name changes happened at Ellis Island. There was no documentation, no policies, no intent. Again, people came in with a name on a ship's passenger list. They left with that name, essentially, and they were free. If they had purchased their ticket in, let's say, Europe, they could have purchased it under pretty much any name they chose to purchase it under that they chose to use, which would have been on the ship's passenger list. And once they left Ellis island, they were free to use whatever name they chose or whatever name their children chose. Spell it however they like to spell it, keeping in mind that people were not all literate, and so they often just chose simpler spellings to make it easier. And certainly, again, Americanize some of the.
- [40:13]
B
Some of the spellings of the name
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A
they want to fit in and Americanize things. Absolutely. So just be aware of that. I know you've got some family story that your, you know, your ancestors names were changed against their will and that didn't happen. So just be aware of that. Did not happen. And nothing of the kind happened at Ellis Island. George, let's. Unless you've got something else there, I think you're going to talk.
- [40:36]
B
I have another email.
- [40:38]
A
Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't have that written down. What's. What's your other email?
- [40:43]
B
This is from Lori, and she writes. Hi, George and Drew. I'm a longtime listener, in fact a completist, and I've learned so much from you. I was fortunate to find your podcast soon after I began doing genealogy when I was a child. I was always told we were, quote, Scots, Irish and English, unquote, on my maternal side, and Scots, Irish and English and Dutch on my paternal side. DNA have largely confirmed this for me. So I listened with special interest as George described his plan to dig in to the Scots Irish in his family. But, boy, do I have a lot of those.
- [41:29]
A
Yeah.
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B
And that she's writing to ask if we'll. I'll do some updates. In the new year, particularly in in the form of maybe some short book reports on the the books that I'm finding helpful. And Drew can affirm to the fact that Amazon was keeping our our mailbox busy during November and December with new books on Scott Cyrus Research. And I'm and I'm telling you I've got them here, I've got a stack of them and I need to sit down and start working with them. And then I most certainly, Lori, will will report back on on the books that I find helpful and those that aren't so helpful. Maybe. Why not? But Laurie goes on to say, George, I had the good fortune to hear you speak in person many years ago at the public library in Burlington, Iowa. And I remember that trip very well. And Drew, I haven't heard you speak in person yet, but it's on my bucket list. Thanks to you both for all you do for the genealogy community. Sincerely, Laurie.
- [42:48]
A
Thanks, Laurie. Speaking yeah, in terms of speaking in person, although I was at RootsTech, I gave three talks in person and I want to advertise I'm going to be speaking in Sacramento, California for the Root Cellar Group. Let me get you some details on that. But this is the the Root Cellar is the Sacramento Genealogical Society and the event that I'm speaking at, their spring seminar for 2026 is on Saturday, April 18th. And so as you might imagine, that is going to be that's going to be in Roseville, California, at the Maidu M A I D U. I hope I was pronouncing that right. Community center at 1550 Maidu Drive in Roseville. So you can register for that now. You can go to their website. The registration closes on April 10th. So I just want to make sure that we have shared that. We'll also do that. I'm doing four talks, two of which have never been given before. They are brand new. And so I'm excited about those new talks as well as the ones the other two. George, you were going to say.
- [44:03]
B
Yeah, those of you who have been with us for a number of years, you know that about six years ago we began our online genealogy education site, Genealogy Guys and, and right. Genealogy Guys Learn. And, and we, we ran that successfully for a number of years. But about a year ago we, we worked with the people at MyHeritage and at the Family Tree webinars site and they have actually taken over our content and they are adding them, periodically adding our videos to their website. And we just had a new one announced. The new Genealogy Guys video is called Dissect obituaries for no clues. And you can find it at family tree webinars.com genealogy guys/. But the presentation is free through March 27th, which is just. That was yesterday, which just passed us here. But I've got to tell you, this was one of. This was one of my favorite talks to. To put together an update on a regular basis and to present because people don't always understand what's involved with obituaries, death notices, funeral notices and. And the like. So we urge you to take a look at the Genealogy Guys videos out at Family Tree Webinars.
- [46:05]
A
By the way, I can get a chance to share with you, although we'll put it in the show notes. But the web address for Root Cellar is Root Cellar. That's R o o t ce l l a r.org.org so you can go there, you can see my smiling face, you can see the list of what I'll talk about, and you can click to register to that. That particular event again. That's me on, on April 18th, Saturday, April 18th. And you need to register by April 10th. So we got a little bit more time. Not a lot, a little bit going back to. Well, we're going to. So I'm going to talk about RootsTech. And before I get into the gist of it, one of the fun things about RootsTech, some of you may know this, is that every year, you know people who have registered for RootsTech, whether they're there in person or whether they've registered for the free one online, if they brought a tree on the FamilySearch family tree, you can actually look to see if any of your relatives who have registered for rootstec are also on that tree. And in fact, people keep adding their names to that or getting onto it. They allow it to be active during, before, just before RootsTech, during RootsTech, and for about a month, six weeks after. And right now, it's still active till the end of April. So if you haven't played with that, that RootsTech 20, 26 relatives I have, just for numbers sake, I'm gonna go back to my dashboard there. I have 5,726 relatives. Now, some people I rented money. I know I have friends who have lots more, tens of thousands, if not more. But and here's the interesting thing, George. This just happened. This happened like just now. Normally, my 500, 5727 relatives are all on my mother's side and specifically most of them are on my mother's father's side. My, my grandfather Granddaddy Martin. And if you, if I look on that, yeah, I see most of them. I have only a few that are from my maternal grandmother. This is for the first time I have one of my Roots Tech relatives is on my father's side. Yes. Particularly my Irish, my, my Smiths and, and who are Irish. So I have a new fourth cousin once removed who is related to me through the Highlands. That's H Y L A N D. And I'm going to, I'm going to look at that relationship and see if that holds up. Well, which it probably will. I know that I'm descended from the Highlands of County Leash, Ireland, so I'm excited about that. One of my to do's in terms of working on my own family, since I only have till the end of April to kind of get this done, is I'm going through at least and trying to verify all the people that are either at least third cousins or at least fourth cousins. And when I say fourth cousins, they could be once removed or twice removed or whatever to see if their relationship to me holds water. Well, whether it's my tree, which could be an error, or their tree which could be an error, or both of them could be an error. But I like to verify it. And so I've already done all the third cousins so far. They're all done. But I now work, I have like 20 something fourth cousins and I need to work on those. So. George.
- [49:51]
B
Yeah, I was looking at my collection here too at RootsTech and what I found is it's interesting. I have a total of 46,358 relatives from all locations. And you think, well, that's really special. I've, I've looked at, at a number of these that look like they are, they are, are connecting me with the Holder line, with John Holder and Rachel Morrison who were married and then their children. But in every case that I've gone into, Drew, I have found that the, the son of, of John and Rachel is listed as Abel. And that was not the son, it was Greenberry Holder. And so I've there, there are a lot of people who have the wrong information and I'm not sure really quite how to get them straightened out.
- [51:00]
A
Right. Well, that's part of the, the work that has to be done. But yeah, so again, that's one of the fun things you can do with RootsTech even if you didn't go there physically or if you did go there physically, even if you're at home and you were registered for RootsTech. So you could watch it virtually. And a lot of those talks, those keynotes particularly, are still available. Many of the other recordings are available. My talks being live at RootsTech, were not recorded, but you can also enjoy those. But again, the Roots, the relatives of RootsTech is still available for you to play with until about one more month, until the end of April. And so I suggest you take advantage of that. Rootsec was great. The weather was good. You know, it didn't get too nasty at any point, which was actually bad for their snow because Utah has been kind of low on snow and low on water. So that's been a problem. But the conference itself, I think went extremely well. There were not too many problems. I did make one little mistake. I will caution anyone who goes to conferences like Russia, Roots Tech, but particularly any large conferences, is before you actually arrive, recheck the schedules to see if something didn't get changed. It turned out a couple of the things I had planned to go to got moved, whether to a different room or got moved to a different day and time. Sometimes that happens because sometimes people, you know, there's a lot of reasons that schedules have to change. And so I ended up maybe missing one or two sessions I wanted to attend because I was in the wrong, I went to the wrong time. I really had to be really careful about sessions I was presenting because even some of those had some slight room changes that I needed to know about. Again, you know, if you do happen to go to Roostech, it's normally every year at the beginning of March. They've already announced the week, I think it is again the first week of March of 2027. And so if, go ahead and make, make some plans, make sure you're not tied up that week, but you get hundreds of sessions to choose from. You have lots of vendors. This is. And George and I both talked about this endlessly. If you have questions about products and services, this is the ideal opportunity to go to RootsTech and talk to the people that sell the products and offer the services. I did one of my talks, which was one of the first times I had done it this way. One of the talks I gave was to. Was about DNA. And actually, except for living DNA, all the DNA testing companies had a booth at RootsTech. So when I gave my talk, I was able to show a slide which listed the names of the companies and, and their booth numbers so I could tell people, please, after my session, if you have questions specifically about any of these particular, you know, companies, please go to the expo hall and ask your questions there because they're the people that know their products.
- [54:17]
B
And don't be shy because those people are there to talk to you. They've got the most information, and they are. They'll talk your ear off. And every question could possibly come up
- [54:28]
A
with, they are wonderful. And again, I made so many new friends. Some of the new friends I made were at the expo hall. I talked to some vendors that I did not know, and I had nice, long conversations with them. And I would consider a number of them friends now because I really got to know them and their products. So as a result, in fact, I need to do a couple things like join a couple of societies that I was not already a member of because there were societies there offering, you know, sharing what they know and again, lots of other good products. So I don't know what else to tell you. They were obviously Salt Lake City, if you've never been. A couple of things. Great restaurants, lots of good restaurants, lots of hotels, from the priciest down to the inexpensive that are nearby. And of course, the FamilySearch library, which was. Yeah, yeah, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. It. It was open every day. And I got there early. I got there Sunday so I could go in on Monday and do a little research, which I did. A little research. You didn't do an actual research. I didn't do any of your research. So you forgot to tell me and tell me in advance next year, George, what you want me to look at so I can put it into a schedule. You know, that's. Let me share that little bit of advice again, because this is important. Of course, anytime you, you know, if you're researching a. A genealogy question, you should have a research plan. And I'm not going to go into all the details of what's got to be in your plan, but one of the things in your plan needs to be exactly what record you're going to need to look at. You also, first, don't want to look at records that you could have looked at from home that are online. So do all your online work first. First so you can learn what may not be available to you at home, because FamilySearch limits some of their materials so that you either have to be. Well, you may have to be in a FamilySearch center, a local facility near where you live, or you might have to be in a library, an affiliate library, which is usually a public library, not always, but often near where you live. But sometimes there are records that you can't even look at in your family search center or affiliate Library. They're only available in the FamilySearch library in Salt Lake City. Those are the ones you want to put on your list to look at when you're out there. And there's things that are not digitized. There are books. There are tons of books. We already mentioned how many books there are in the catalog. So if the book is not online, George mentioned copyright is one of the reasons there are a lot of books on their shelves. And so those are the ones you want to make a list of to check once you're there. So just. I'll mention that again. But beyond all of that, what a great time and place to meet lots of other genealogists, learn from them, share your experiences with them. You know, it's not often, as genealogists, we get to be around a lot of other people that are actually interested in what we do. You know, sometimes our families only want to hear a little bit of it and then they're done. But genealogists do like to share their successes with others, and Rootstech is a great place to do it and to learn new, New things. George has already talked a little bit about AI.
- [57:46]
B
It's a, it's a great place to learn some new skills. One of the hot topics in At Rootstech was artificial intelligence.
- [57:56]
A
Absolutely.
- [57:57]
B
And there were panel discussions.
- [57:59]
A
They were individual presentations. Yep. They were great. They were great. Even I had one on an intro to AI and so, yeah, that was one of the hot topics. And I expect that's going to be a hot topic for at least for another couple of years, for sure. So DNA was still a big topic. And then you just got, you know, there was a lot of topics about how do you preserve the stories in your family and, and, and, and how do you do specific kinds of ethnic research. That may be difficult because every ethnicity and every country that people have come from are different in the way they've kept records, recorded records, preserved records. So there's a lot to learn. And frankly, I don't know. You know, I don't see how you can be a genealogist without, not without learning something new every day. You really need to learn something new all the time in order to become a really good genealogist.
- [58:56]
B
And another thing that I tell people to do, and I, I do this for my own work as well. Go back and look at the work that you've done in the past. Look at the people you've researched, because there, A, there may be new records available, but B, you may, you may have had a record Image of some sort in your possession all this time, and all of a sudden something will jump off that page that will answer question or it'll pique your interest in researching another branch or another line.
- [59:37]
A
Well, the other thing, George, is that records and things that you did 5, 10, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, you have better skills now. You should have better skills. And that means that you will pick up new things that you didn't notice before. Things that did mean anything to you at all, 10, 20, 30 years ago, that mean something to you now you've learned that you need to look at those things. So, so look at material again because you're now a better genealogist than you used to be.
- [60:07]
B
That's true. And, and some, some things become obsolete. Can you imagine? I've been doing genealogy for so long, I remember being very dependent on soundex for the sound records, for sound alike names, and that broke through any number of barriers for me. But do you use Soundex today? Probably not. But I'll tell you, my database has source citations for soundex.
- [60:44]
A
Oh yeah. And another thing that is not as important today, I'm not saying it's not at all important, but it's not as important today as it was years ago is learning how to mount some microfilm on a microfilm reader and crank the microfilm. Because these days so much of it has been scanned. What you're now doing is looking through images that are online somewhere. That's what I was looking at at Familysearch. There were actual entire books that had been scanned that I could read online. And so I didn't have to crank any microfilm while I was there. So things have changed a little bit. And that's why George and I like to keep going with this kind of podcast to bring you up to date on what's new and what's changed and what are some new skills you might need to learn. So, George, is there anything else before we call it a day?
- [61:36]
B
I just want to make a comment here that the, the things that I found important and helpful in my genealogical work 10 years ago, 5 years ago, 30 years ago. I'm amazed at what the technology has brought to us and what it's made available. And you can't be a conscientious genealogist if you're, if you're not taking advantage of all the tools. And I'm not saying you have to be a forensic DNA expert to work with DNA matches, and you don't need to be a programmer to work with artificial intelligence. But you do need to have the. The knowledge, the basic knowledge and this essential skills to use the tools, get started and make strides. And of course, as in older days, you're going to learn new skills, you're going to become more proficient, you're going to gain more insights, and you're going to become a better researcher. And that means not only are you doing better research, but you can be a good mentor to other people.
- [62:58]
A
That's right. Let me remind everyone again, we need your questions and your comments and your resources and any other feedback you'd like to give. Please send that to genealogyguysmail.com and we will take a look at that because there will be more episodes of this podcast and we are looking forward to those. Thank you for all of you for your patience while we were offline for a number of months. Thank you for that. Thank you for encouraging, telling us how much you missed us and, and that you were so glad when I said online and Facebook, among other places, that we were coming back and we would be, we would have new episodes. And here they are. And so thank you. No, not very easily. So thanks for your support. And with that, George, I think we're gonna call it an episode. And until next time, everybody. Yeah. Take care of yourselves.
- [63:59]
B
All right, Happy hunting and let us hear from you. Sam. Sa.