Newest Innovations Connecting You to Your Family

Time travel, artificial intelligence, cutting-edge DNA research, traveling soil, and digitized recipes are just some of the items that jump out from the RootsTech 2022 Innovators Portal. Groundbreaking ideas from this year’s forum are about helping us see the past more clearly. They are also about showing us how we can make our personal and family lives seem more of a reality to future generations. Speaking of groundbreaking, one of the featured innovators used that word literally. Read on to find out how!

Even though the actual 3-day RootsTech 2022 event is in the past, the virtual content remains available. So you can still check out this year’s Innovators Portal, along with almost everything else at RootsTech.org—all the sessions, the speakers, the forums—all for free, even if you’re reading about them here for the first time.

Below are some short descriptions of industry innovators we think you’ll enjoy. Through the Innovators Portal, you can access 14 approaches to finding and preserving ancestral records, past, present and future. When you click the session links below, you can see brief videos from each innovator, join worldwide discussion groups (if you register for RootsTech), and learn how to interact with or dive deeper into each innovation.

Time Travel with Map Explorer

TheGenealogist, a company based in the United Kingdom, has devised a way to travel back in time to see what your ancestors' neighborhood looked like hundreds of years ago. Map Explorer lets you see the lay of the land way back when. Area maps gathered over centuries have been calibrated to overlay modern, up-to-date, scaled maps for easy comparison. Now you can see what has changed since your great-great-great-grandparents walked those 5 miles in the snow to school and back every day.

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Digitizing Recipes with Fareloom

Every recipe tells a story, and Fareloom is the app that engages people and their families and communities in gathering and preserving unique recipes along stories and traditions passed down through generations. Start sharing, and all the ingredients come together for discoveries that will enrich lives.

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Goldie May Subway Map Timeline Tool

Goldie May is more than a family history research app. It includes power tools for genealogists, such as an automatic research log, abstracts and citations, task lists, locality research, timeline analysis, with the Subway Map and adds cloud access to your research. Their innovations portal for this year includes a dozen brief video presentations that elaborate more, and we’re sure you’ll want to explore further.

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The Tree of Mankind Age Estimates by FamilyTree DNA

This talk introduces FamilyTreeDNA’s newest innovation, called the Tree of Mankind Age Estimates, based on full Y-DNA sequences from more than 66,000 testers, which has recently surpassed a whopping 50,000 branches. That major milestone is also discussed.

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New Way to Share and Record Memories

StoryTree is the ultimate “Swiss Army knife” app and website for sharing, cultivating, and recording personal and family memories and history. It can be done online or offline, in real time or in your own time, all in a fun and simple new way. StoryTree accomplishes all this through four key integrated tools, all in one place, all synergistically supporting each other.

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Advances in Visualizing Your Past

Trackuback is a platform for historical visualization, where you can experience your background in new ways. Your own family research connects to historical maps, archaeology, demography, and large historical events and back to local history. Explore the context your ancestors lived in, and the places they inhabited. Put yourself in the flow of history.

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Stories Shared Privately in Pictures with Ponga

When we research genealogy, we compose our family trees from facts such as births, marriages, and locations. This important work is even more exciting when you have old photographs of ancestors to explore at the same time. Ponga has created a way to pull facts, details, and stories right into pictures so that they can be used to capture research, crowdsource stories, and curate a legacy. It started with advanced technologies to organize photographs by the faces of the people in each photo. Rich with stories, your pictures become the tissue to connect generations with the family they share.

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Pull, Stick, and Record with Audiostickers! Add Recordings to Photos and More, from Audiobiography

Transform your photo books, photos, journals, scrapbooks, kids' books, love letters, and anything else you can imagine, with Audiostickers. Just peel, stick, and scan with your phone camera, and tap to record. Each sticker holds an unlimited amount of audio, and costs less than a buck. Organize, delete, rerecord, even add up to 10 digital pictures to each sticker to give more life to the story. All recordings are stored and played back from the cloud, there are no subscriptions or ongoing fees, and you can download your own backup of the audio at any time. Stickers are water and tear resistant. You can confidently stick them to anything.

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Whoowe, So Future Generations Can Talk to You

Imagine being able to bring up your great-grandparent, a distant ancestor, or one of the greatest minds of a certain time on your smartphone and ask questions about the person's life—seeing, hearing, and experiencing answers as if on a face-to-face video call. The Whoowe mobile app creates that experience for your friends, family, and future generations to learn about you. At the most basic level, you can record yourself for posterity and know that they’ll be able to hear your voice in the future. But it gets way cooler. You start with a video selfie and build from there. The amazing part is when you start answering questions, just basic stuff about you and your life. The app creates a voice-activated database of these videos that reacts when current or future generations ask the same or similar questions.

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Walk around in Your Family Tree with MobileFamilyTree 10

This latest update from Synium Software for MacFamilyTree and MobileFamilyTree adds another dimension to visualizing your place in the tree. Not being able to see a large family tree when it is printed on a single surface was the seed of frustration that grew into this amazing virtual world. Branches are no longer confined to a flat surface. Just go to the presentation and see for yourself. This a serious innovation.

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Dig Your Roots by Bella Italia Genealogy

With Dig Your Roots by Bella Italia Genealogy, you can receive a box of soil from the very town that your Italian ancestors are from! Not only will you be provided with true Italian land, but it will be accompanied by heirlooms from your family. With this unique gift, you can get closer to your family and ancestry without the hassle and stress of long flights. It may even lead to an ancestral journey of your own in the future.

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Preserve Your Story, Leave a Legacy. Family Heritage Publishers

This brief presentation by Mark Hancock explains how you can overcome some of the most common problems of writing a well-constructed memoir by using the free and completely internet-based tools offered by Family Heritage Publishers.

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New Way to Record and Share Life Stories with Rakonto

Want to record life stories but don't know where to start? With Rakonto you can record and share a life story in 5 minutes. Ask others to record their stories into your collections. Record audio or video right into Rakonto, or upload previously recorded audio or video files. Transcribe your English recordings automatically! Tag people, places, and events. Include photos, files, links and more. Share securely with family and friends.

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FamilySearch | Get Involved! Handwriting Recognition with Artificial Intelligence (the Human Touch)

FamilySearch specialists show how built-in intelligence systems have magnified family history indexing. Online records and handwriting recognition science gathers massive amounts of data for research worldwide. Then volunteers using the Get Involved! app add a human touch to the artificial intelligence.

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Participate in RootsTech 2022—It’s Not Too Late!

Go ahead and visit the RootsTech site for free, and browse sessions or visit many of the other virtual attractions. We'll highlight new technology and innovation throughout the year, so be sure to sign up for updates at RootsTech.org (using the subscribe button near the top of the main page) so you're always in the know.

RootsTech offers a lot to take in, way more than any one person could explore in the few days designated for the live conference. That’s why you have until at least RootsTech 2023 to absorb all the information available. By then you’ll be hungry for more—more insights, more keynote speakers, more discussions, more new connections, and more new friends interested in the same things you are.