Welcome, everybody, to RootsTech. It's good to see you all here. How many are here for the first time at RootsTech? All right, give yourselves a hand. [APPLAUSE] [LAUGHS]
I hope you enjoy your time here at RootsTech, and hopefully you walk away encouraged rather than confused. And I hope that this class will add to that. I hope you're excited not only to be here, but to leave with some knowledge. And you might look at this and think, how on earth is he going to get through 10 tasks in an hour? But my goal is to not make you discouraged. If you remember one thing, remember that family history is more exciting than it is discouraging. And you might need someone to remind you of that. And you might need to have a text sent to yourself in a week that reminds you of that, because you might be frustrated in a week. But if it's more frustrating than exciting, then people stop finding out about their families, and that's no fun. So even though we'll get through a lot of stuff, just leave encouraged. Leave excited. And you know what? You're not going to break the system. You're not going to hurt anything. Try, try, try again, and just be happy, be excited, because family is fun. So my goal is to encourage and not to confuse. And you can take notes. There are 10 tasks, like you've seen, in the syllabus, that's in the app. You can access the tasks. They might be in a little different order than how I'm going to present them. I went back and looked at it and felt that this was a better flow. So they're all in your syllabus, they just might not be in the right order. But again, leave happy, that's the goal. So a little bit about FamilySearch--I've been there for a little over 10 years. Again, my name's Devon Ashby and my job right now is to try to make family history easier for people in Latin America and to help with so many people down there that are trying to discover their families. And so while that's my role, I've done a lot of work here at FamilySearch trying to figure out how to simplify this crazy web we call FamilySearch.org. So I hope that we can navigate through FamilySearch.org a little bit today, and that you can get out of it and still be smiling, because FamilySearch.org can be a really complicated place. There's trees and there's apps and there's photos and there's stories and there's audio. And then you go talk to somebody else, and he tells you something, and you feel like you don't know anything. But FamilySearch can be complicated. We know a lot of people come, they create accounts, they engage. A lot of people come, they may leave, they may create an account, and then we lose them for a while. So part of it's because it's kind of difficult. But we want to make it easier and we're trying to make it simpler not only for people in Latin America, but throughout the world. So we're going to get through the maze today. So the first thing I want to say is--create an account. Now many of you probably have an account, but if you don't, I'm going to try to convince you why you should create an account. Because you'll have a better experience and you'll be able to do more. In fact, if you don't create an account, steps like 2 through 10 are really irrelevant, so they're not going to help you very much. So create an account. You can do it here this week at RootsTech. If you're having problems, go to somebody at the booth and they'll help you create one. One thing you need to know is that there's none of that. It's free, FamilySearch is a free service. And it's always been free and we try to keep it that way, and we plan to into the future. So you don't need a lot of money to come onto FamilySearch.org because we don't charge anything. We believe that family is exciting and it's fun, and so the experience of discovering them should be that as well. So let me tell you why it's a good idea to create an account. Number one--you get access to billions of historical records. You get access to a family tree that's a collaborative tree, where people can help and connect and work and solve problems together. Sometimes there's some frustrations and people make some mistakes, but we want people to engage. If we wanted to create a different tree, we would just let genealogists build it, and then nobody would access it. We want people in there, building it, collaborating, learning, feeling, growing, engaging with each other. There are memories--another way to say "memories" is--basically it's free storage. So if you create an account at FamilySearch, instead of losing your data in Instagram and Facebook that scrolls away--have you ever tried to find something you put on Facebook, and you're scrolling and scrolling? And you're at a family gathering, and you're like, just 30 more scrolls, I'm going to find this. FamilySearch will keep it there and make sure it's there for free. And you'll be able to access it again, and it's going to stay there. Mobile apps--we have made a lot of progress in the mobile space in the last couple of years, and I hope that you see--we'll talk about this a little bit later, but there's even an opportunity at RootsTech to find relatives and to connect with people. So be sure you download the apps. This week, it's free. Next week it'll also be free. [LAUGHTER] So be sure you download them. Again, if you don't know how to navigate, just go to the booth, ask someone. They'll help you. But I'll show you a little bit more about that later. Digital books--a lot of people don't know that we have digital books at FamilySearch. We're talking compiled family histories from partner libraries across the world. And FamilySearch has a lot of stuff, and so does MyHeritage and Ancestry and Findmypast, but guess what? There's a lot of stuff that's on the internet that's not in those places, and there's a lot of stuff that's in print, in books, and libraries that's not on any of those sites. So there's a lot of books that you can access for free at FamilySearch. And then I hope you leave this encouraged to know that there's help. The booth is helpful. There's family history centers across the globe that will help you as well. There's chatting, there's phone calls, there's emails. We want to help. So that's what an account will give you. So a lot of people ask, why free, why FamilySearch? Well, we think that connecting to your family is important and that it'll help you understand who you really are. And because that's important to FamilySearch, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sponsors this as a free gift for everybody. So we are--FamilySearch is a nonprofit, but it's sponsored by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints because family is important, and because connecting to them makes us better people, and it helps us raise our own families. All right, so what do you do? If you have an account, you just go to the sign-in screen and you sign in, and it works, right? It always works. [LAUGHTER] [LAUGHS]
Most of the time, it works. So if you have an account or an LDS Account, just use that and go and sign in. If you do not have an account, there's a place that you can go on the website when you create a free account. And by the way, this is no different than Gmail, or Amazon, or Yahoo, whatever you use. Most sites, obviously, have an account that you provide a little bit of information and a lot of times, an email for. But if you're coming and you're creating an account for the first time, what we'll do is we'll ask you to create a username and password, and then we'll try to have you start building your family tree. So it says, first name, last name, username, password. And then it will step you through--tell us about your father. Tell us about your mother. What memories do you have of them? What pictures do you have of them? We want to encourage people to build a tree as they sign in. That's task one. Now, once you have an account, we can continue with the rest of the steps. So, the task number two is--add a name. Why should you add a name? Ah, well, because it feels good, and it feels good to connect with our family members. And a lot of people--well, we all have family members that have passed and have died, but we can still be connected to them, and we can meet them and we can learn about them through stories and memories. And there's a lot of research, and more and more coming out all the time that says that kids that know about their family's past, and kids that talk about their families at dinnertime, handle stress better than those that don't. Emory University has done a lot of studies that talk about how we're better prepared for life and challenges when we know what challenges and difficulties our ancestors have been through. And it feels good, so we want to encourage people to add names. Now if you're into the tree--I just took a screenshot. Sometimes you'll be in the tree and you'll see a couple at the very top, and then you'll see their children. But oftentimes, through records, we can find people that were indexed, or people that appear on documents that aren't yet connected to a family. So when you see that information, at the very bottom, we try to put Add Child, add someone. We try to put that Add button in a lot of places on the website so families can grow. So for example, here, you see all the kids, and then at the bottom it says, Add Child. And what you do is you type in the first name, last name, the status, the gender, date of birth, birthplace. When you add someone, be sure you let the system autofill certain fields. Like for example, if you're adding a place, as you start typing it in, if it autofills--you know how you do that in Google and you type a search, type something in, and it fills it in, you're like, that's exactly what--how do you know what I was thinking? FamilySearch tries to do that with places so that we can standardize those and we can have a common geography for places. Also death years--we want those to be standard, as well. And a lot of times, in haste, people enter information in wrongly. But we want it--if the system autofills, let it do that. Then, if you let it do it, we can send you hints based on those geographies and those localities, and then we can try to help you build your tree. We don't want you to just go build it and you're on your own. We want to send you stuff that can help you build your tree. Send you hints, send you records, send you documents. People might connect with you--hey, I saw this information. Tell me a little bit more about that. Can we meet up? DNA does really well with a lot of that kind of information. If you have an experience like this, go ahead and add that way. Again, if you don't--this is going back a little bit. But if you're starting to build a tree, here's one of those initial screens. This is a screen about my dad, and I'm adding someone. It says, tell us about your dad. So I put his name in, I put his middle name, put his last name. Then it says, write your stories and memories about your father, and then I can write that story. And then it asks me to do a date that it will try to standardize. And if I have a photo, I can add that in, as well. And then away I go, building my tree, trying to connect with family and make that tree as full as I can. So that's a very brief explanation about how to add a name, but as you go through FamilySearch in the app and on the website, it will ask you to add. So do your best to continue to add because the more you add, the more we will try to send you, and the more hints and suggestions we will try to give you to actually build out your family. Quick question. Yes, I was wondering, isn't it important to look for that person first to see if they're already out there, before you just type it? Thanks for mentioning that. She says, isn't it important to try to find the person in the website if they already exist? Yes, if you type in somebody and you're searching for someone, especially if they're deceased, chances are that they might already be in the tree. So yes, especially if they're deceased, try to search them first. Living people that you put in your tree aren't really seen by anyone else. So in this case, this is something I'm adding about my father--you can see down there he's still living, so people can't really see that information. But those who have passed on and who are deceased in the tree, if you search before you add, that's a good rule of thumb because chances are, they might be in there. Thank you. All right, let's talk about something you can download and something you can do. Some of you may already know about your fan chart. If you don't, you could just go ahead and print this version. You can find lots of examples of charts on the internet, but the engagement level here is minimal, in my mind. So I want to show you how you can download a fan chart once you've added people or found people that are already in the tree, how you can download something that's kind of fun. This is my fan chart, and this is because I have a lot of family that has done some genealogy, but also because I've done a lot. And now I can look at what we call a fan chart and not only see the people before me, but I can also see my kids at the bottom. In fact, I don't know if the placeholders for five kids is standard because my wife and I had four daughters, and I logged in one day and saw that there was a blank spot, and so we fortunately had another child to fill that in, but it was kind of creepy. [LAUGHTER]
I mean, we always joke when people ask about our kids. We always tell them we have five kids and they're all boys except for four of them. So we had our four girls and then he was born, and we put him at the end. Thank heaven there was a slot for him. So I'm going to now just show you how to do this. So I'm going to jump out of the presentation. I'm going to go over to FamilySearch. And I've already logged in, so I'm going to come over to the tree. Under FamilySearch, you can see Family Tree, and then click Tree. And then, let me see if I can--we have a backup if this doesn't work.
So it's funny, I was just in another class and the same thing happened to her. Everything was working just fine, and then it--and then halfway through the video, it kind of froze.
Let's see. [PHONE RINGS]
If not, we have-- [TONE] There we go. [TONE]
Let's see if we can get this going.
[TONE]
All right, so under Family Tree, we can go into Tree.
And then here is where the fan chart generates. Now as you can see, there's a little dropdown. And under the dropdown, you can look at a couple of different views. There's a portrait, there's descendancy, there's landscape. But what we're talking about is the fan chart. Again, the nice thing here, I can see me. I can see our children, and then the ancestors in the past. And if I want to generate one of these for our son, for example, I could come in here and click that little--see how that grays, that little box becomes gray? And then I put him in the middle, and then it populates for him. And we get not only my side, but my wife's side as well. And I've seen a lot of people do some really fun things with these. I've seen people make placemats for each of their kids so that you can eat with your family when you have dinner. [LAUGHTER] I've seen people make rugs so you can step on your family when you come into the house. I've seen people do lots of creative things with these fan charts, but they really are fun. We've printed a couple off and put them in rooms of our children to kind of remind them of where they've come from, which is kind of fun. But if I wanted a printed chart for our son, I would come over here to Options in the corner, and I would click this. And then I would click Print. And then when I click Print, it generates a PDF copy of this fan chart, and I can save it. Up here, I can click Download and then it asks where to put it. I'll just choose onto my desktop. And then I can go and access that fan chart. And I can email it, I can save it somewhere. I probably don't need to upload it to the tree because it's already there, but now I have a great chart for my son so that he can learn where he comes from and he can learn about the different people that came before him. Yeah? As you print that, if you didn't notice, it added two generations you didn't mention. Thanks for mentioning that. What she's saying here is what I was showing you on the website only showed so much of my fan chart. Now when I download it, I get two more generations, more people to eat with, more people to enjoy. So that's how you download a fan chart. There's also a couple of other fun ways to do charts. There's booths here at RootsTech that do wonderful charts. There's also a place on FamilySearch where you can come in to create a tree keepsake. It's kind of more of a designer chart with family names on leaves and surnames. So you can come to this area as well, and actually download some different versions of your fan chart. All right, task number four--you hanging in there? Now we want to talk about records and hints.
There's a lot of people that have lived on the Earth, and I think we have six billion plus now, but think of all the people that have lived on the Earth. Estimates are that somewhere around 100 billion people have lived on the Earth throughout its existence. Well, how are we going to find all those people? First of all, if you're trying to find them at FamilySearch, you need to build a tree so we can send you stuff. But once you do, how do you go find more family members? How do you know where to go? If you go to FamilySearch.org and you see how up at the top, there's a green box around Search? If you go to Search, you can search records from all over the world, and we have billions and billions and billions of them. When you go there, you can click on the map and search by a continent, by a country. And it will drill in and let you see what information we have there. I'm just going to show you really quickly what that looks like.
Back here on FamilySearch, I'm just going to click on the Search tab. So this is what I--I took a screenshot to show you. But let's say that I have family from Canada. If I click up on Canada--and I do, by the way, my wife's side--and let's say that I want to go find information in Ontario. If I click Ontario, then magically, it takes me to an area where I can now search for indexed historical records from Ontario. Also I have a catalog that I can search through. There's a wiki that actually helps me learn about that area of the world and gives me information. As I scroll down--we're not trying to hide stuff from you, but sometimes people don't see this--but it may look like we only have five collections. You see this button right here? You see why it might be important to click that? When I do, then I get a lot more choices to come and search through. Now one of the great things about Canada is it has great census records, and so I can now go through there and search through that census. Sometimes it's helpful to search a collection rather than everything FamilySearch has because the search can be a little more refined. If you see over here, these little cameras--sometimes this information, it was a text index that we generated or negotiated with a partner to have, but if you see these little image icons here, images on FamilySearch, this one says, images at a partner site. We try to give you little icons so that you know where we put the records on. And sometimes when we do partner deals, the agreement is that people can access an image-only version of the index, or just text. And if you want to see the actual images, we'll send you to Ancestry, or MyHeritage, or something like that. But what we can show you, we always try to. Now also at the bottom, and in some countries, we have a little bit more. There are also, in many cases, image-only historical records. We did a poll and asked people whether they would prefer to wait for microfilm to be shipped to them, or to just have it online for free, and they said online for free. So that's why we've digitized microfilms so you don't have to wait for them. Does anybody here have a microfilm reader at home? OK, I didn't think so. So rather than that, we thought we'd put them online for you. So if you scroll to the bottom in these countries, oftentimes you will see, for example, if anybody has records from Brazil, we have millions of images from Brazil that we put here while we're trying to index them. They're being indexed, but we'd rather show them to you than send you microfilm. So remember, the icons are important. Show all the indexed collections--we try to put those first. And then under, we try to show you these image-only historical records for those collections. So there's a couple of places to look if you're specific in finding a certain area of the world. Now I mentioned this a little bit, but we have a lot of great partnerships that I hope you'll learn more about here at RootsTech.
There's access to many of these sites. All over the world there are family history centers. If you go in, access on these sites typically is free. If you have an account with FamilySearch, you have an LDS Account, there are also ways to access these records as well. If you're trying to know more and learn more about how to access partner records through a FamilySearch account, what you need to do is go to the FamilySearch booth and say, this guy that talked too much and told me that I needed to learn about partner accounts through FamilySearch, can you help me? And they'll route you somewhere, they'll find somebody to help you. So we love partnerships. FamilySearch does not have everything. We have a lot and we've been doing it for a long time, but in this industry, which I hope you'll see a little bit more of at RootsTech, we try to share because family is important. All right, next I want to talk about indexing. Now some of you who've--who's indexed in here before? All right, you might laugh and say, well, it's harder to index than download a fan chart, and you know what? You're right, because indexing takes a little more time. But guess what? We can't send people suggestions and hints about their families if we don't index records. That's why it's so important. So has anybody been to FamilySearch and seen these little boxes? Any time you see one of these, you should just say a "thank you" prayer for an indexer, because that's who made it available. Most of my tree has grown because of what somebody else did to help me find that family. And any time you see a record like this--a hint, we call them, these little blue boxes--it's because somebody took the time to index a record. Any indexers in here? A few? OK, thank you. This is a virtual high five. [POW] Thank you for indexing because trees grow with indexed records. How do you know if they're indexed? How do you know they're indexed? Because, for example, when you're on--she asked, how do you know if they're indexed? When you're in FamilySearch--and I'll show you an example in a minute. When you're on FamilySearch and you see these boxes, it usually comes from a collection like this New York City marriage records collection. And something from that collection that was indexed, we think belongs in your tree, so we send it to you and we ask you to verify it, and see if indeed, it is that person from your tree. Now some of you might have an aunt or a grandma that did a lot of work, but guess what? Even good grandmas and aunts miss stuff. And lots and lots of people, even for those of you that have a lot of--and might have a full fan chart, like I showed you--you'd be surprised what you can find because people were missed on a census, or in probates, or in marriage records. So any time you see these, see if you can't add that person. I'll show you just a really quick example, here. I'm going to jump out again. Come to the home page, here. And you see this Recommended Tasks, here? This Albert Heinrich--if I click on this little blue button that I just talked to you about, it's saying that this individual has been indexed in these collections, and FamilySearch is saying, we think this is part of your family. So here, all the areas here, are all the places we think that we have an Albert Locke that is related to you. And what you would do, if this 1940 census looked right, you could come in and you could expand it down a little bit more, and you can see that it's not just him--there's a spouse and there's a child. So even at my home page, we're trying to give you more suggestions so you can build out that tree and have that information to attach. Yeah? Is there a way to lock FamilySearch so nobody else can change it? Is there a way to lock FamilySearch so nobody goes in and changes it? Not currently. I mentioned this earlier, but we really do believe that there is greater benefit in collaborating than there is in locking lines down, and a lot of research has shown that. One thing I would recommend, not to minimize what she's saying, because it's important--there are some great tools like RootsMagic and Legacy that will let you keep a version of your tree independent of the FamilySearch tree, where you can make sure what you have is right and you can make sure it's sourced well. And then you can interface and integrate into FamilySearch through those tools. And there will be booths here that can explain that. So a lot of people love having a family tree independent of FamilySearch so that they can be sure it's sourced and it's as right as you think it is, but then they interface into FamilySearch that way. So let me just show you really quickly, because we don't have a lot of time to get into the details. This is what indexing looks like. There's no program to download anymore. It's all on FamilySearch.org. So when you go there--and I'll show you in a minute--there's a tab at the top that says Indexing. When you go to Indexing, there's a little tab that says Web Indexing. If you click on Web Indexing, you're still in FamilySearch.org. Away you go with your indexing. And basically, what we ask you to do is to look at this document, this historical record, and index the names and the dates and the places out of that document so we can do what I just showed you with all those collections for Albert Locke. Indexing enables hinting, that's why we do it. We want to do more of it. We want computers to do more of it. We want people with language skills to do more of it. Because we have an abundance of indexed records in English, we're trying to get more records available in other languages. [INAUDIBLE] Oh, yeah. To the right are the instructions. Yes. Don't index anything without reviewing the instructions. She's saying if you index, read the instructions. She's right. It's not shown here, but they are here, I promise. So before you index, get in there, read those instructions, and you can go ahead and do that. This is what your home page looks like. You can see progress. You can see batches. You can see how much you've done. You can see batches that are about to expire. In the old program, what happened was there were two different indexers that indexed the same batch of records, and then there was an arbitrator that kind of reconciled any of the differences. Now in web indexing, we have somebody index the record and then we have somebody review that batch, those records, and make sure that they did it correctly, and then away it goes. That's a little bit of a change we've made. But the web indexing tool, it works really well and it's getting a lot better. So again, just to show you really quickly, if I'm out here at FamilySearch.org, and I go up to Indexing, like I said. Come to Web Indexing, if I click that, then I can see my batches. I have family from Pennsylvania, so it's a good idea for me to index from where I have family. And I open this batch right here, and it pulls up the image, it's downloading those images so that I could see it. And like this good sister said, here's my instructions right here. I can go through these, I can understand what they're asking for. I can see some examples. And when I've read that, I can just close this out and it says, should this be--should it be indexed? I go through, I tell the system if it should. Then it gives me names, dates, places, other information that we will then pull out of this record and use that to send to somebody to build their family tree. Does that make sense? This is what indexing is. If you're doing it for the first time, I recommend go find a computer, find somebody to help you. Call your grandson, whatever you want to do, but give it a try because it gets easier as you learn more and more how to do it. All right, let's keep going.
Now we're going to transition a little bit into the mobile space.
And who carries around their laptop in their pocket? OK, I didn't think so. Some might, but most people carry around these phones. And a lot of what you can do on FamilySearch.org, on the website that I've been showing you, you can now do on your phone. And I want to encourage you to download it because there's a lot of features that are going to come to the mobile app that we can't give the same experience with on the website, if that makes sense. We hope to do what we're doing on the phone online, but it's not the same experience. And so if you want the full FamilySearch experience, be sure you download the apps. Remember, they'll be free this week at RootsTech and they'll also be free next week, OK? So how do I download the app? You go to your app store. If it's Google Play go to Google Play, and search for FamilySearch, one word. If you have an iPhone, go to your iOS, your Apple Store, and search for FamilySearch. The question always comes--why is there two? There's two because one is kind of the full app experience with the tree, the other one is more of a memories-focused app that's focused more on photos and stories and memories. They're both good, if you only want one, do the one on the left. Do just the FamilySearch tree because it will give you most of what you'll need. So now I'm going to try to show you a couple of features here on the app. So let's see if we can get this to work now, because it's pretty fun if I can actually show it to you rather than tell you about it.
OK.
Are there people that will help you? Yes, there are.
OK, let's go back. OK, I did a lot of stuff. Don't worry about what I did. I'm just trying to show you what I can see on my phone, all right? So I'm going to mirror this. So you can see, right now, I can navigate through my tree on my phone. And because most people keep their phones with them--most people that live nowadays do--when you have this information in your pocket, you can do some really, really neat things. For example, I have one grandfather that's still alive. The other three are deceased. I can now go into his page on the phone in my app, and I can do some pretty neat things. I can scroll over at the top to this button called Memories and I can see information that's been uploaded about him. And if I wanted to come in here and read some of that, read a memory book about him? I can come in and access that information. Oh--it's just coming up. So he's hand-written a lot of stories in here, and now--well, actually, I'm lying. His wife typed a lot of what he said in here and I think he may have signed it at the end. But this is really fun because I can read these stories and I can share it on the fly with anyone because it's just in my pocket.
If I come back, this little green button--we'll talk a little bit more about this a little bit later, but you see this little--this green plus? If I click that, it asks me, what do you want to do? Oops. Do you want to write a story, record audio? Let me go back. Let me do it for this one because you'll see it more.
Sorry, I'm clicking the wrong button.
There's too many banners.
I can add information on her this way. If I come over into the Memories and I click the little plus button there, it asks me a couple of things. It says, do you to add a document? Do you want to write a story? Do you want to record audio, or do you want to add a photo? I can do all of this now on my phone. I can take a picture of a document. I can take a picture of him live. I can record his voice. We'll go into a little bit more detail here in a bit, but there's a lot that you can do with just what's in your pocket. And it's not just for people that are alive. You can do this for people whose documents you have. You can do it for tombstones. If you can see it, you can probably take a picture of it. There's many, many different ways that you can engage here. There's also tasks. We're even trying to send you hints on your phone. So on your phone, you can see these little blue icons. We're trying to, again, help you build your family tree. Over here on More, at the very end, you can do a couple of neat things. For example, find relatives at RootsTech. If I want to opt in and agree to that, it will show me who I'm related to at this conference. And I can go through and I can find somebody and say, oh, Brad--is Brad in here? OK, but he's my fourth cousin. Wherever you are, Brad, in this mess of a conference. I can go in here, and see this button up on top? I can send him a message. I can connect. I can talk to him. I can see what he might have. There's also Map My Ancestors. If you have not--if for no other reason to download the app, you do it for this, it's worth it. Because any time you put an ancestor into your tree, we will then create a pin for you to show you where that person had a vital event. For example, if I go over now into Europe, and I want to go into Denmark, and I want to click this person, I can see now, Niels Hansen was born in this area, in Fuglebjerg--which I did not say right. But it can show me birth and christening, death and burial. It's mapping my family across the world. And sometimes, there's even people that have these photos. So you can go in and map your ancestors. And one thing that I think is kind of fun is you can kind of get your family where you want them, and then you can even take a screenshot of this, and say, this is where I have my family from in Europe. And you could just kind of take a picture of that and kind of send that, or keep it for yourself, or send it to someone. But mapping your ancestors is a really, really fun feature. So for what you can do with Memories, for what you can do with maps and connecting with people, there's a lot that the app will provide you if you download that and sign in. So again, just to recap, there's a great Memories feature in the app where you can add documents and stories and audio and photos. This little radar screen is that Find Relatives at RootsTech, or Find Relatives Around Me, that you can then search for and connect with people. And then Map My Ancestors, which I just showed. Will it map the people around you right now? Wouldn't that be cool? Will it map the people around you right now?
It will map the people that are here at the conference. So if you go into the app and turn that feature on, Find Relatives at RootsTech, it should find those people. It won't do a Google map to that person because that would be kind of creepy. But if you know someone that shares that surname and you wander around hoping to find someone, you might just bump into them. I'm not going to be surprised when we hear stories of people randomly bumping into people here at RootsTech. There will be opportunities here at the event to find them, as well. One more question? Is there a limit to the audio [INAUDIBLE]?? Thanks for asking that question--not that I know of. Just upload until it says limit. I've never reached the limit and I have hundreds and hundreds of them in there, so--we did the demo. All right, let's talk about uploading a photo and let's try to break it down a little bit more than what I just showed you. So years ago, in 2014, I did a class here at RootsTech and it was about Facebook. It was called "Facebook Is Family History." It was then and it still is. I like to think that Facebook is just a digital journal where people just share pieces of their lives, and then people can interact and comment on those. When I gave this class, I said something like, one day, some smart engineers are going to figure out how to let us come into FamilySearch and then pull in data, pull in photos and information from these partner sites. Why? Because I want to show you a picture of--in just a minute, I'm going to show you a picture of certain records that I believe FamilySearch is making often, daily in many cases. But before that, I just want to give you a quick stat. More than 350 million photos are uploaded to Facebook each day. That's a lot of people sharing a lot of stuff. And they estimate it's over 250 billion photos that have been uploaded to Facebook, which is a lot more photos than are on FamilySearch. But there is a lot of information, and why are people doing that? Because Facebook generates records just like we try to collect. Here's an example of a marriage certificate from Facebook. It's a status change--this is my sister. She got married couple of years ago, 2013. She married Austin, which is great. She said I could use this today. But what you get--and I don't show it all on this screen--but you get people that comment. You get people that like it. You get people that share it. You get people that do all kinds of random things. And now at FamilySearch, you can now pull in some of this data from these partner sites. Most of you probably have more pictures on Facebook than you do on FamilySearch.org. They're probably going to scroll away, but that might be OK. If you want to pull them into FamilySearch, I'm going to show you how to do that, because now--engineers were listening. And when you add photos into FamilySearch--you can do this on your phone or on the website--you can now pull in photos from Instagram, Facebook, and Google Photos, and it's great. I have a lot more photos online in some of these tools than I have on FamilySearch.org. Not because I want to lose them. Because that's where a lot of people can engage and connect and share that. I'm a big fan of Google Photos, I think it's great. I think it's saved a lot of data that I could potentially lose. But I just want to show you how this experience works. I'm not going to do all three, I'm just going to show you an example from Google Photos. So don't be creeped out--this was a Halloween party we had. But on Google Photos, I can sign in and then I can choose the photos that I want from Google Photos, and then I can pull those into FamilySearch, and then I can write stories about them. Or I can share them with my kids and they can write stories about them. And you can see on the left, do you see all those folders? Those are all folders that I've built on Google Photos. And so I can navigate through all of those different folders, jump in there, and then pull in information. I'm just going to show you how that works really quickly. Now remember, we don't have time to show you on both devices, but you can do this also on your phone. So if I come out of this screen and I come into Memories, into the Gallery.
Once I'm in the Gallery, you can see that I've got a lot of different photos. How do you get to the screen where you can upload photos from these other accounts? The green plus is your friend. You just click this. And this is the screenshot I took and just showed you. So if I want to come into Google Photos, I just click that. It asks what account I want to use, then I hit Next. This is just a Gmail account. And then it loads and it thinks, and for this example, I'm just going to go into something for one of my daughters. We do these videos of our kids, and so I created this photo album for her. But any of these photos now, I can pull into FamilySearch and I can preserve them so that I don't lose them, or so they don't belong to some other third party, if that makes sense. But all I would do is say, cute, cute, and--bunny. I don't even know why that's in there. I'd click this and then I'd say, Import Photos. And now they're processing into FamilySearch and now they're there. So I can go into any of these partner accounts and pull that data right into FamilySearch and keep it there because I have free storage and I know it's going to be there. And I know it's going to save there and I can share it with my family and friends. So that's a little bit about how you upload photos. Let me mention one other thing-- please, please, please, once you put information into FamilySearch, don't forget to identify who the people are. You want to tag these individuals just like you would on Facebook. You go in there and you click on the face and a little circle pops up. And then you write and identify that person, in this case, Millicent Price--this is one of my wife's ancestors. We identify that person and then puts this picture into her page on FamilySearch so everyone can see it. So it is, in many ways social. I just need identify it, then that picture of Millicent can go to her family members. I've said this before, and I'm going to say it again--if you have questions, if you have concerns, if I'm going fast, please go find somebody at the FamilySearch booth. Or you can go to the Help Center on FamilySearch.org, and there's a whole section on Memories. Go into that section on Memories--there's tutorials, there's guides, there's step-by-step processes that can help you make sense of what I'm sharing. This is a similar exercise--a similar activity to adding a photo--creating a story. I don't think we appreciate yet how important it is to create these stories. Oftentimes, when I do classes, and we might not do this today, but if I asked you to pull out your phone and to find an example of family history on your phone, and I gave you 30 seconds, most of you would probably find a picture that has to do with your family on your phone. And then if I said, now I'm going to give you 60 seconds to write a paragraph about that photo, most of you could probably do that. And then what I would say is, think of FamilySearch like a filing cabinet. I have a filing cabinet in our garage that's full of important stuff. And I hope we never have a fire, but we put it in places like this because it feels good and we think we feel that it's safe. What I need to do is pull out my phone and take pictures of that stuff that really matters, and put it into FamilySearch, because then, I don't think--I've never heard of a website burned down. Maybe it's crashed, but this data will be here for you throughout the years to come. So if you've got photos and if you've got stories that are important, take pictures of them and put them on. All you do--you look for that green plus like I showed you, and then here's the template for writing a story. It says title, story, upload photo. We do this with our kids--let me show you an example. We have three kids, three of our daughters that have FamilySearch accounts. And what she did is she drew this dragon, which probably is on some family crest, somewhere in England.
And she said in this story, she said, yeah, I drew this. It took me two hours, but I got all the shading and highlighting right, and ended up with this. And then she gives other details. The great thing about this is, I didn't do this. And she did, but now we're not going to lose this photo because she has it in her account and it's preserved. Our nine-year-old--I think she's nine. Nine-year-old--the older one, here. What we do on Sundays often is we say, all right, guys, it's time to do stories. And they holler and cheer and ask for treats, but--they don't always holler and cheer. But we say, all right, it's time to do some stories. We just go into Google Photos and we say, what photos have we taken recently that we want to pull into FamilySearch so you can write a story about? A year or two ago, she was in the Peter Pan play and she got--and she's a total digital native because I said, why don't you write this story? She's like, dad, I don't want to write the story, I want to speak it into your phone. And I was like, no, sit down and write it. Because if you do say it, it's going to be all garbled. But the fact that she even knew that you can do that, which you can, is pretty astounding. So we had her sit down, she wrote a couple of words. And what it says is, "this is us in Peter Pan. It is our night. Me and my sister have mics on." But it's havemicson--it's all one word, so it's fun. The easiest way I know how to journal, which is basically how Facebook does it, is upload a photo and write about it--that's the simplest thing. Now I know you don't always have photos, but if you do, upload them, write about it. It doesn't have to be long, it can just be a paragraph. So we're going to do one more demo, not this one. How are you feeling? You doing OK? All right-y, because we're almost done.
Let's talk about uploading a document. Like we have filing cabinets, a lot of people have boxes or shoe boxes like this. If you have this information, pull out your scanner, which is called your phone, and take pictures of it. If you, on your fan chart, ever see a zero next to Memories, and you have those, or you know someone that does, go get them. Go over, pull out your phone, go into the app. If you go into the app to that person that's in that photo, and you start taking pictures, it'll automatically attach it to that person without you having to tag it, OK? If you see a zero in Memories, please go in and actually add memories for that person. This is an example from my gallery of documents that I've put in there. I've put journals, I've put some calendars. I've put some stories that grandparents have written. I put stories that have been passed down. My wife, what she does, is she has some family history books that an uncle up in Canada has done. She goes through there with this device called a phone, and she takes pictures of those in the profiles of those individuals, and uploads all that information into the tree automatically. Yes? [INAUDIBLE] is in Memories? This is in Memories, yep, mm-hmm. So if you don't want documents that Google can use [INAUDIBLE] If you have sensitive documents, it's probably not a good idea to put them in there. But if you have something that's trying to preserve a memory or a story, you can absolutely put those in there, OK? Go ahead. There's another question. When you die, how is your daughter going to access stuff [INAUDIBLE] Good question, so she said, when I die-- or when she dies? When you die. When I die, how is my daughter going to access that information? Again, when I mentioned that living people are private and locked down in the tree, that's because they're living. When they pass and they die, that information--for example, in my account, once I just am gone and the system recognizes that I'm gone, that information will become part of my daughter's memory and account--person page of me. So that information is going to come to her that way when I die. So because I'm living and she's living, those accounts don't sync up. But anybody who's deceased--that's why I said it's important to tag. All of the people that are deceased, those memories and content translate to anybody that's connected to those people. Who tells the system you're deceased? The system--the system--a family member can go in there and flag it, or the system itself knows.
How can a family member flag it if they can't see it? How can they find it if they can't see it? If they're living, they probably can't find it. But if they're tagged and the person is deceased, it will show up in that memory. Yeah, so I pass away, I do all these things [INAUDIBLE] I have little boxes for, but they have their own little boxes now. They have their own thing. I pass away, how would they ever get all those things that I've created for them if we can't link-- Let me let me try to give the example of my grandpa because this is what happened in his case. He was alive, I added memories. I created a placeholder for him, but he was living, so it wasn't his actual account. He died, the system knew that he had passed, he was marked as past. Those memories and what he had in his page were combined--the system did that. So that's one of the ways we're going to try to structure that moving forward. OK, there's one last task. It's task 10, and I'm going to show you one example. And if you have more questions about what I just went through, go to the booth and get some additional information and clarity on that, if you're worried about some of those privacy restrictions. Task 10 is to record audio. Let me give you one principle of recording audio. It's this--if you can hear it, you can record it. If it's a video, if it's a cassette tape, if it's a record--whatever it is, if you can hear it, you can record it. And how do you do that? You do it, preferably, like I showed you a little earlier, through the phone. Now I'm going to just show you one example as we wrap up and close. So in my Memories, I have a section that's audio. I also have a little folder I've built in here of my parents, and I hope that this will work so you can hear them. So I'm just going to--let me pull this up. [MUSIC PLAYING]
When I was a little boy, this is--oh, it just stopped. Hang on a sec.
You did hear something, right?
[MUSIC PLAYING]
(SINGING) I peered through rainbows-- When I was a little boy, this is what I would fall asleep to, my parents practicing music. (SINGING) Dreamed of tomorrow, but stayed inside. The past was holding me, keeping life at bay. Doesn't my mom have an awesome voice? My dad sings well, too. If you have information like this, please upload it. Please pull your phone out. Please go to that person and click Record, and you'll be able to capture that information. Again, as we wrap up, the Help Center can help. Booths here, can help. Family history centers can help. Lots of people can help. If you have privacy concerns, please go talk to somebody at the FamilySearch booth. But remember, as I said at the beginning, it's more encouraging that it is discouraging. So just go do it. Just go try it. The system's not going to break. You'll feel something, hopefully, that will encourage you to continue. And with that, we're done. Have a great day.