#NotAtRootsTech

#SaturdayNightGenealogyFun

It’s Saturday Night – 

time for more Genealogy Fun! 

Your mission, should you decide to accept it (cue the Mission Impossible music here) is to:

1)  The RootsTech 2022 Virtual Conference was Thursday through Saturday (March 3-5) this week.  Did you register and attend classes?  Did you watch the Keynote talks?  Did you visit the virtual Expo Hall?  What was your favorite experience?

Think back to RootsTech several years ago. Do you remember the hashtag #NotAtRootsTech used by those of us participating from home. For, me that hashtag describes my participation in RootsTech 2022. Due to conflicts, I haven’t watched any session in real time — making me “Not at RootsTech.”

While not being able to watch in real time, I have read quite a few blogs about RootsTech and I watched one of the Ancestry presentations. From this brief interaction with RootsTech content, I wanted to investigate two of these new features: Life Story and PhotoMyne Scanning

Unfortunately, I am struggling. Currently, these tools are only available on the app — and the app on my phone had not updated. After figuring out how to force the update, I was able to create a simple ‘story’.

This one page story was created by simply pushing a button. If I wanted to enhance this story, I could add additional text, people, photos or a title page.

Even though creating a life story is relatively simple, sharing the story appears to require the app on a mobile device. Thus, I will stick to creating stories about my ancestors on my blog for now.

While the ability to add a life story was easily found on the ‘Discover’ tab, the PhotoMyne/Scanning feature was more difficult to find. To access this feature I had to click on the image icon in the upper right corner of the pedigree view of my tree to open the gallery and then click on the + sign to open the menu to add photos.

Using the PhotoMyne scan feature was quick and easy. Since I tagged the people in the photo, the photo automatically appeared in the gallery for the individuals on my Ancestry tree.

While the app makes it easy to add and tag photos, I likely won’t use it very often. That’s because the app makes it difficult for me to save the image to my computer. By saving my scanned images to my computer, I can add them to FamilySearch, use them in blog posts and make sure they are backed up.