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Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

Day 2 – #RootsTech – #NotAtRootsTech - Thu, 1 Mar 2018

Thursday.

  1. Watched the Live Stream Keynote Speaker: Brandon Stanton. “I get to wake up in the morning and choose the work I want to do.” “Following your dreams, is nothing but hard work.”

  2. Took a look at Randy Seaver’s Compendium for new posts I hadn’t seen.
  3. Read Jill Ball’s post on Day 1 and watch Jill’s interview of Hannah Morden of Living DNA, who happens to be Australian.
  4. Saw Blaine Bettinger’s post on Facebook about Jonny Perl’s win, which reminded me to join Jonny’s DNA Painter Facebook group. Once there, I watched a 5 minute video of Jonny’s presentation of DNA painter to the contest judges and a small crowd. If I can find a public link to that presentation, I’ll post it.
  5. Watched a 6 minute video by Lara Diamond of an interview by several people of Brandon Stanton in the media hub, also on Facebook with no public link.
  6. The great thing about the RootsTech Live Feed is that I can take a shower and then rewind the feed so that I don’t miss anything. That’s one advantage over being there in person. Of course, all the people at RootsTech can watch the live stuff from the feeds after they get home. But there’s nothing like the actual experience of being at RootsTech.
  7. Read Thomas MacEntee’s article about Living DNA’s announcements. New to me were details of the Orion chip they use, that tests over 656,000 autosomal, 4,700 mitochondral and 22,000 Y-DNA SNPs.
  8. Next was the live stream of Yaniv Erlich of MyHeritage DNA. It started with a very nice intro to DNA testing with a good description of how the chip determines each SNP using synthetic strings of DNA that finds the complementary strand of your DNA and joins with it. He explains the phasing they do and claims a 99% SNP accuracy. Then he explains imputation when comparing two individuals to fill in missing SNPs with “very good accuracy”. “You would not get bad results, but you would get better if they are from the same company.” They then “stitch” together identical sections that have a small split, e.g. due to an error in phasing.

    Very interesting and something I’ve never seen a DNA company explain before was how they do confidence classification, so as to include as many likely true matches as possible and exclude as many “child-only” matches as possible. This was a good DNA talk.

  9. Read on the #RootsTech twitter feed that:

  10. Last year at RootsTech, my Fitbit told me I was averaging close to 14,000 steps per day. It’s 3 p.m. here in Winnipeg and I look and I’m at (ugh) only 1,400 steps. That means the #RootsTech is 10 times better than #NotAtRootsTech. I don’t use Google Photos and really don’t use Catholic Records, so the next two live streams were not of interest to me. What better time than to stretch my legs with a walk to Tim Hortons.
  11. I always appreciate the sponsors of any conference. It’s amazing how many sponsors RootsTech has this year, including some interesting ones who you wouldn’t suspect, like WordPress and Dell EMC:
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  12. And Jason Hewlett tweeted his selfie from the screen cap that I made at the exact same time which I included in my blog post yesterday:
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  13. Read Carole Steer’s blog post about Brandon Stanton’s talk this morning.
  14. Here’s Jill Ball’s 5 minute interview of Jonny Perl.
  15. Finished off the day watching the final live stream by Deborah Abbott: “A Gift of Life. Who’s Writing YOUR Story?” She said: “The things that I’m going to talk about, you have to make it relate to you.” Here’s some of the things she told us to record: That first boyfriend. How was that kiss? Did they like their spouse right away when they met? What extraordinary things did they do?  “Before writing your ancestor’s story, write your own…. As you talk about yourself, you can pull those ancestors in. … Write your memoirs. Tell you descendants about things they know nothing about.”

    She said to record every bit of what you went through
    … and she told us her stories.
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    Deborah Abbott received a standing ovation for her talk.

See today’s Live Stream here: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnfpAwSNVJo&t=9s

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    Day 1 #RootsTech From Afar - Thu, 1 Mar 2018

    RootsTech 2018 has started. This year it is a 4 day affair running from Wednesday to Saturday. They added on Wednesday, which last year, was an Innovator Summit day and an extra you had to get a ticket to separately. This year, the day was part of the package.

    Last year there were a lot of people on Wednesday, and swarms of people from Thursday to Saturday. This year, the swarms started on Wednesday. Registration for attendees opened on Tuesday and the lines were hundreds of people long. If you weren’t a RootsTech Ambassador or otherwise an insider, you’d have up to 2 to 3 hours in line to register.

    The number of people also filled up many of the talks. I read a number of reports of people wrote that they couldn’t get into some of the talks they wanted to. Unfortunately, that’s what success brings. There’s the old joke about being told how terrible a restaurant is because you can’t book a reservation as they’re always full.

    I had the pleasure (honour) of going to RootsTech in 2012, 2014 and 2017. This is my off year, so I am what’s technically called a #NotAtRootsTech-er this year. LDC of Ottawa has a wonderful #NotAtRootsTech Survival Guide and made buttons for those of us not there to display:

    Having been a past participant of RootsTech, I know what it’s like. I gave a talk to the Manitoba Genealogical Society on Monday, and one person couldn’t be there because they were at RootsTech. I asked how many others had been. Not one of the two dozen there had. So I spent the next 20 minutes expounding upon how they must make the trip at least once.

    With the experience of RootsTech fresh in my mind from last year, I didn’t need much to get in the RootsTech spirit. Between the Live Feed yesterday, social media Twitter tweets under the hashtag of #RootsTech and #NotAtRootsTech, Facebook posts, Blog posts and YouTube videos, there was enough to make me feel totally immersed and involved all day. At 8:28 a.m. RootsTech time, I tweeted:

    Day 1 was a bit of a different day. The Keynote by Steve Rockwood was at 4:30 pm, rather than first thing in the morning, so people got to attend talks prior to that all day. Also, the Exhibition Hall did not open until the evening, which likely contributed to the overfilling of the talks, because the huge hall was not available as an alternative. I’m sure it will be easier getting into the talks on Thursday and Friday.

    On Day 1, I enjoyed the live feeds of “Family History in 5 Minutes a Day” by Deborah Gamble, “DNA—One Family, One World” by David Nicholson and Hannah Morden of Living DNA, “Organizing and Preserving Photograph Collections” by Ari Wilkins, and the General Session and Innovation Showcase to close the day.  I have to admit I didn’t watch the WWII talk since I personally have little interest in WWII research. I went to the online RootsTech app and downloaded the handouts for each of the talks as I listened to them.

    Jason Hewlett was again the entertaining host. It was a pleasure meeting him (albeit clean shaven) last year:
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    There were several announcements that I found very interesting, most on a DNA front:

    Living DNA was making the biggest splash. They are all-in this year, being a major sponsor of RootsTech. And they are working to put themselves on equal footing with Family Tree DNA, 23andMe, Ancestry DNA and MyHeritage DNA and turn the big four into a big five.   
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    Above: Hannah Morden and David Nicholson of Living DNA

    One thing they showed in a video during their presentation just blew me away:

    David and Hannah during the day announced that Living DNA had a new “Family Networks” offering. As part of this, they will be making match data and a chromosome browser available.

    Later during the Innovation Showcase section, 5 representatives from the 5 DNA companies were on stage together, which might be a first:

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    Ran Snir (MyHeritage DNA), Jim Brewster (Family Tree DNA), David Nicholson (Living DNA), Robin Smith (23andMe), Sarah South (Ancestry DNA) and Scott Fisher moderating.

    They were asked if they’d be able to work together. David Nicholson said: “I think it’s great that we’re all onstage together. That’s a start.” But then Robin Smith said that competition is healthy and good for everyone,. I agree that both of them are correct. Both cooperation and competition is needed.

    Another big announcement was from MyHeritage announcing a New FamilySearch Tree Sync, allowing FamilySearch users to synchronize their family trees with MyHeritage.

    Prices for DNA kits at the Conference are as low as they’ve ever been. No better place to pick up a DNA kit than at RootsTech. Which company? Why not all of them?

    It was also nice to see Curt Witcher, Judy Russell, David Rencher and moderator Scott Fisher on the Innovation Panel. image

    Being a contestant (and 3rd place winner) of the Innovator Showdown in 2017, and someone very interested in DNA software, I wanted to know what was going on with the DNA Innovation Contest this year. This was a somewhat last-minute thing announced by Grow Utah in December. This is a $30,000 cash and $20,000 in-kind contest with 3 prize winners ($15K 1st, $7.5K each runner-up).

    That did not give contestants much time, but they still got a really good group of entrants together. The six finalists were given space to display in the Exhibit Hall:

    The six finalists include:

    The winner was Jonny Perl of DNA Painter. Jonny had to fly in from England for this and it was quite an adventure. He has really done an amazing job in adding useful and easy to use features in his free online offering.

    The two runners-up were RootsFinder and ItRunsInMyFamily. I was very happy for Dallan, who was in the 2012 Developer Challenge with me (I had entered Behold, Dallan was a top-6 finalist with his GEDCOM parser) as well as Heather Henderson who works with Dallan. They had entered RootsFinder in the 2017 Innovator Showdown and I got to meet Heather as she was the presenter for RootsFinder in the semifinals.

    That was quite a first day. I look forward to what else comes out of RootsTech over these next 3 days.

    And be sure you read what everyone has to say about RootsTech. Randy Seaver is keeping up his Compendium of Blog Posts for RootsTech 2017.  Each person has a unique perspective and you get a different taste of RootsTech from every post, so pick some to read and enjoy.

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    1000 Genealogy Programs on GenSoftReviews - Sun, 18 Feb 2018

    GenSoftReviews reached a milestone and now has 1000 different genealogy programs listed at the site.

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    The numbers have been creeping up over time. GenSoftReviews started in Sept 2008 with the 355 programs I transferred over from my my old genealogy software links page. The number grew to 466 by the end of 2009.  556 for 2010, 595 for 2011, 702 for 2012, 765 for 2013, 862 for 2014, 936 for 2015, 980 for 2016, and 992 at the end of 2017.

    I’m always on the lookout for new programs that can be considered to have a genealogy aspect to them. There are a number of people who suggest new programs to me from time to time, which I’m very appreciative of. If the program is active and supported and it’s not already on GenSoftReviews, I add it. If you know of any current programs not on GenSoftReviews, please let me know.

    Early on, I used to delete programs from GenSoftReviews that no longer were available. But now I just mark those programs as “unsupported” and point their web address to an archive.org snapshot of what their site was, or to some other information about the program that’s still on the web. Many unsupported programs still have active users as well as reviews on GenSoftReviews, including such programs as Family Tree Maker by Ancestry, The Master Genealogist (TMG) and Personal Ancestral File (PAF).

    As genealogy software expert Tamura Jones tweeted:

    That’s an excellent question. There are a lot of hardworking developers out there who have created programs with their own ideas of what’s needed to help a genealogist. They all deserve a look at. Taking Tamura’s question a step further, I’d ask: “How many have you even heard of?”

    Here’s a breakdown of the 1000 programs:

    • 466 Windows programs
    • 116 Mac programs
    • 105 Unix programs
    • 132 handheld programs (phones or tablets)
    • 389 online programs

    These total 1208 because some programs run on multiple platforms.

    • 355 full featured programs that can edit and save your genealogy data.
    • 404 utility programs that read in genealogy data and do something with it.
    • 233 auxiliary programs that do some genealogical task for you.

    Hmm. These total 992 and should total 1000. I’ll have to find the 8 unclassified.

    • 627 free programs
    • 287 programs you have to purchase to use.
    • 65 programs you have to pay a subscription to use.
    • 71 programs that are unsupported.

    This totals 1050 because some programs have both free and purchase versions.

    The 1000 programs as I write this have acquired 4926 user reviews, or an average of about 5 reviews per program. The top 10 are:

    • 560 reviews: Family Tree Maker 2008 – 2014
    • 474 reviews: My Heritage
    • 343 reviews: Family Tree Builder
    • 223 reviews: Ahnenblatt
    • 205 reviews: RootsMagic
    • 200 reviews: Geni
    • 185 reviews: WikiTree
    • 173 reviews: Legacy Family Tree
    • 150 reviews: The Next Generation (TNG)
    • 147 reviews: The Master Genealogist (TMG)

    These top 10 make up 2660 or 54% of all the reviews.

    270 (27%) of the 1000 programs have had at least 1 review. So that means 730 which is 73% have not had any reviews yet. What uncommon genealogy software do you use? Does it have a review at GenSoftReviews yet? If not, why not consider adding your review?

    55 programs have had at least 10 reviews which is the minimum needed to qualify for a GenSoftReviews Users Choice award at the end of the year.  Of those, 39 have been a winner of the award at least once. That means they had averaged a rating of at least 4 stars out of 5 from their users.

    Next time you wonder if there’s a genealogy program out there that might be able to help you do something a little easier, why not take a browse through the 1000 programs listed at GenSoftReviews. You might just find the gem you’ve been looking for.

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