What's New? Stories from RootsTech

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One of the wonderful aspects of RootsTech each spring is the new features from many of the major genealogy and family history companies which they announce there, and of course the sales! Be sure to visit the Expo Hall to connect with the vendors and get those discounts, some of which last all month.


One of the new features rolled out by MyHeritage is the cM Explainer™ which promises to "Predict Relationships Between DNA Matches With Greater Accuracy." Read about it in their blog. 

The first session I watched this year was What's New at FamilySearch in 2023. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ From me! The feature I'm waiting for has not rolled out yet, but the new family groups tree views should cut down immensely on the proliferation of private still-living people in the FSFamily Tree. It will enhance collaboration with close family and more distant family as well, I hope. The first implementations are showing up now - see more at the new home page. In addition, they are adding more options to enable us to better tell stories about our ancestors and relatives, beyond names, dates and other data. One of my favorites is the ability now to connect profiles of "other relationships" (the FAN club) which enrich and fill out that story. 


Maureen Taylor said in her newsletter, 

I’m still trying to catch up with all the news from Rootstech.  If you missed it, talks are available on demand, and some virtual vendor pages too.

Big news out of Ancestry. They announced their Storymaker Studio in their app. It allows you to edit images, make slide shows, and audio record as well. It’s wonderful to see Ancestry.com jump into the photo space with this. You can colorize images in your account as well.  

From their press release: "Storymaker Studio is a centralized, one-stop destination to curate facts, images, records, and memories and tell the stories of your family history. With this new tool, members can upload and enhance photos and images, record and upload audio files (for the first time on Ancestry), integrate photos with audio, and publish their Ancestry Stories to their trees, on their personal social channels, and within the Ancestry community. We all have a storyteller inside us, but with Storymaker Studio you can become the story maker for your family’s history.

I played around with making a photo timeline of women on my paternal side called a photoline.  Gave it a try adding captions, dates, and details to some family photos too.  

See https://www.ancestry.com/c/product/storymaker for Ancestry's introduction to this new product.


The theme I'm seeing in all of the platforms is helping us tell the stories so that we can better connect with our families, especially the younger ones. This was Christa Cowan's theme all through her talk at RootsTech 2023 | What’s New at Ancestry? and she has a follow-up session called The Anatomy of a Story. She recounted the saying "ask a genealogist what time it is, and they will tell you how to make a clock" and said, we've gotta stop telling people how to make a clock and just tell them what time it is! I chose this image of a clock because it reminds me of the clock my grandpa Thomas Cowan gave me as a child which he had used for many years, but didn't need any more after he retired. I treasure that memory and used that clock for many years. 


Comment to tell us how you have used these products to tell your stories, and how they were received. Or send your stories to SoKingNews@skcgs.org


* Clock image courtesy of PublicDomainPictures; Electonic Mail, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.


Valorie Zimmerman


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