Anyway, it was all in preparation for today. Day 1 of RootsTech London. This post covers news from the Ancestry breakfast and interviews with Dan Snow, Nick Barrett, and Alison Kung.
Ancestry Breakfast
The day started with an ambassador breakfast with Ancestry. First, let me tell you that the venue was amazing. A yacht turned into a floating hotel and restaurant. Yup, you heard that right. Look up Sunborn London Yacht Hotel for more details.
Besides to good food and catching up with friends we learned a lot about what is coming up for the company. Todd Godfrey, Vice President for Global Content, started the morning. I was very excited to hear about the plans for the 75th anniversary of the end of WWII.
With that celebration Godfrey announced they will be releasing TODAY a new collection for the UK. WWII Artillery Tracer cards for 1 million soldiers are now available to search. These cards contain the movements of all artillery soldiers for the army detailing all the movements they made during thier service.
In addition there are a significant number of European records being released. First, 30 million Danish Church records were released last week. For those interested in French records hold tight! They were given access to the French archives and through the partnership will start posting more and more digitized records from the entire country. Keep your eyes open for announcements!
John Erickson, Senior Director for Product Management, spoke about the website and upcoming developments for the platform. We all appreciated his statement that his teams loves feedback from bloggers and ancestry groups. Which we took as thee green light to give more feedback!
Erickson called to our attention a few new features that I wanted to make sure you all new about. One I was excited to hear about was inventory management for tree hints. In the past hints would sit in your queue until deleted. Now, with thier new feature, hints that become irrelevant after tree updates will be removed from your hint queue. I was relieved to hear that because I have to set aside days to just delete hints. It really is a chore, especially if you know they are wrong.
You may also have noticed the hints also give you the chance to give feedback on why or why not you accepted it. This will assist future hint creation, so think about taking the time to give feedback.
Finally, they are also giving more options for parentage suggestions. I am sure you have seen the parental hints on some lines. If you have not, Ancestry gives hints for possible parents to your tree based on other trees. Now they will also give information on if the parent hint is a non-biological relationship. For those of you who have ancestors with multiple spouses this will be handy.
Barry Star, Director of Scientific Communications and Research, spoke about developments in ethnic communities and regions. Which was fascinating, and not only to me. The number of regions was just updated from 43 to 60 by doubling the size of reference populations. This was done by including more samples from around thee world and allowing people with less than 100% of an ethnicity into the pool. By doing that people in North America and Oceania will have better results into thier ancestral heritage.
Following onto that the communities have increased to over 900 world wide. With 423 in Europe alone. These increases are important for researchers as they show migration patterns around the world on a larger scale.
The last speaker was Crista Cowan, Corporate Genealogist, who gave us information on the genealogical research side of the company. Out of the 1600 employees at Ancestry 200 are researchers, approximately 150 with ProGenealogists. The roughly 50 corporate genealogists assist with research for PR like advertisements and television.
Dan Snow
If you are not familiar with the name Dan Snow I bet you know his work. As a historian Snow has presented on numerous BBC and PBS shows since 2002. Today he was the keynote speaker and shared with us amazing stories about his family. Perhaps you saw it on the live stream?
In our group interview he delighted us with more family stories. Several people filmed the interview and when I have those links I will post them to social media and update this blog. I asked him about his opinion on social history within genealogical research. To my joy he told me it was crucial.
Which, if you have ever heard me talk on this subject you will know that I am all about the social history. Snow was adamant that without an understanding of social history you cannot understand the person you are studying. While in the past history was about the framework (names, dates, places) you cannot truly begin to understand a person (or thier genealogy) unless you look at the nuances of thier lives. Which, I agree with wholeheartedly.
Nick Barrett
Dr. Nick Barrett is an amazing historian who is the current Director of the Senate House Library at the University of London. You may also remember him as a presenter on they early UK series WDYTYA and other genealogical programs.
I was also able to ask Barrett about his thoughts on social history and genealogy. As a true historian and genealogist he gave a wonderful answer about how the two cannot live without the other. In his answer he told the group that all forms of historian are crucial for research and each need to talk to the other. That final point I think is the key, and something which needs to occur more often than it actually does.
He also told us about an interesting collaboration occurring between historians and genealogists. Have you seen #HistoriansCollaborate floating around online? Started in January 2019, this hashtag is being used for those historians and genealogists who are working together to solve problems. Check them out, they are everywhere!
One question which was asked by the group concerned how he thought family historians could better contribute to the community (history, archives, etc). Barrett said something which I know I can do better at. We, as the family historian, need to add the context to the records before that knowledge is lost. I was floored about how simple an answer, but it does make sense. Once the holders, or creators, of the record are gone the stories and context under which it was created will also be gone. It was essential a call to arms to annotate your files!
Alison Kung
Alison Kung is the head of Ancestry product at 23andMe answered questions from the media pod on aspects of the genealogical side of 23andMe. While it was a short interview (hoping to have another session later) she did tell us a few things I found interesting.
23andMe surveyed users and found that 52% of those that responded did not know how to get started on thier genealogy research. I found that very surprising, showing that there is a large part of the DNA testing market which needs more help from genealogists. Perhaps that is why we do not get answers back?
This survey is what prompted the October 1st release of the auto building family tree feature. For those who do not know about this feature, 23andMe takes your matches and builds a tree out to the 3rd cousin range based on your tree information and your matches tree information. It is still in Beta, and Kung stated that they are still working on the feature before they go further out. However, for those who do not know a thing about genealogy research this may be the type of start they need.
No comments:
Post a Comment