Day one is over, and even though my cousin is visiting me, I still managed to watch so much. Denise even watched some of the things I had on my watch list.
The first thing I watched was the keynote address from Steve Rockwood, CEO of FamilySearch. I’ve always loved his easy way of telling us about his family since he joined FamilySearch in 2015. He told us about the importance of connection which is the theme of this year’s RootsTech. So if you are posting about your RootsTech experience, be sure to use the hashtag #chooseconnection.
RootsTech wouldn’t be RootsTech without a lot of new innovations. So let me tell you a bit about the ones from Ancestry and MyHeritage. You know I’m all about stories and photos, and both companies have launched new things to help us tell our stories and improve our photos.
Ancestry Stories & Photomyne Partnership
On February 28th Ancestry launched Ancestry Stories. What can you do?
With the new Ancestry Stories feature on the Ancestry mobile app, you can combine
photographs, saved historical records, and text to create a story about an ancestor or
relative in your family tree.
● You can easily save that story to your tree and share it with family and friends.
● By doing this, you could even connect with other cousins who might have additional
information or photos and who doesn’t love connecting with cousins?
Now let’s talk about Ancestry’s Photomyne partnership which was announced during the keynote address for Ancestry. I’m excited about this because I saw Photomyne at RootsTech 2020, and I loved their product and installed it on my smartphone. I loved how easy it worked for scanning photos.
Here are the steps for the process. Once you scan, it clips the photos, and now they are in your account.
With the Ancestry partnership, you don’t have to pay for the scanner because now it’s part of the Ancestry app, and because Ancestry trees are free, you can add photos to each of the people in your tree.
Once you get those old photos out of the boxes and into your Ancestry tree, then you can start crafting the stories of your ancestor in the Ancestor Stories part of the app.
MyHeritage Live Stories
During the MyHeritage keynote address, we heard about Live Stories. Live Stories is an incredible new feature that allows you to create animated videos of your ancestors telling their life stories. This feature was developed using AI technology pioneered by D-ID, the company that brought you Deep Nostalgia™ last year.
You can have a look at the demo below.
It takes the information you have in your ancestor’s profile and creates a story then if you want to edit it, you can edit it and add chapters and photos, customize the voice, and preview the result as much as you like until your LiveStory is ready to share with your family and friends.
You can learn more by reading the MyHeritage blog HERE.
Telling stories and photos are a great way to get those other family members interested in what you are doing with your genealogy.
Have fun on day two of RootsTech