Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Have you tried Collectionaire?

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I had a question from a reader recently about Collectionaire, an online tool for sharing family history information and keepsake media. I have to admit I hadn’t heard of it but I checked it out and was intrigued.

It appears to act as a hub where each person has a collection linked to a family tree. A click on a person in your tree brings up their collection and all the information and media you  have for them. You can easily share the collection with family members by providing a link (and you have control over which privileges to offer them).

Here’s the video from their website:

You don’t store information on Collectionaire. Rather, the keepsake media is stored in whatever cloud-based app(s) you choose, and they’re brought together in Collectionaire.

There’s a free tier, as well as two other plans at $2.99 a month and $4.99 a month.

I’m traveling now, so I haven’t had the chance to explore it, but I thought I’d turn to the experts here. If you’ve tried Collectionaire, I’d love to hear about your experience, good or bad. It seems to have such potential!

 

How to watch RootsTech Connect

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As you may know, the 2021 all-virtual RootsTech conference (dubbed RootsTech Connect this year), is going on right now. I have not been able to watch much of it yet, despite it being on my calendar for months. But I have explored the website a little bit and I’m blown away with the learning opportunities.

The great news is that most of the sessions will be available to watch until next year’s RootsTech in March 2022 (which is scheduled to be held in person). You can watch as many sessions as you want now. They’re available on demand. Live keynotes are available on a schedule. My understanding is that the keynotes will be available to watch after the conference.

But there are features that are probably going to be available only during the conference (that is, through Saturday). They include:

  • Chat, where you can interact with like-minded genealogists
  • Relatives at RootsTech, where you can see how many people who are registered for the conference are related to you through the Family Search tree. So far, I have 37,376 relatives attending the conference! (A quick tip: I found that when I clicked on “See Your Relatives” using Safari, I got an error message. But it works just fine in Chrome and Firefox.)
  • Searching for your friends who are attending see how you might be related (my dear friend and podcast co-host, Shannon Wilkinson, and are 9th cousins once removed!)

(I don’t know for a fact that these will be going away after the conference, but I don’t want to take any chances.)

There are lots of ways to approach participating in RootsTech, but here’s what I suggest (and this is what I plan to do this weekend when I’ll have more time):

  1. Go to the Rootstech website.
  2. Login to your Family Search account (or create one if you don’t already have one).
  3. Click on Menu, then Relatives at RootsTech to find your relatives and see how you’re related. If you want, send relatives a message either by clicking on Send a Message under their name or through the little Connect box at the bottom of the home screen.
  4. Click on Guide Me for some suggestions on what you might want to watch or if you’re feeling confused, watch the Website Tutorial by clicking the button near the top of the screen.
  5. Alternatively, if you know what you want to watch, click on Sessions and search or browse for sessions.
  6. Add sessions to your Playlist, so you watch them at your leisure.
  7. Join a chat room by clicking on Connect, then Chat Rooms. Click on the little magnifying glass to search for a particular group or interest.
  8. Explore the Virtual Expo Hall. You can browse or search for particular vendors.

The whole thing is free of charge and it’s an opportunity you don’t want to miss. I have always been blown away by how well organized RootsTech is. This RootsTech Connect conference takes it to another level.

I want to be clear, because my emails indicate there is some confusion, that I am not affiliated with RootsTech. I’ve been a speaker twice and I’m an enthusiastic  attendee, but otherwise I have nothing to do this amazing conference. I just want to make sure my readers are making the most of it!

 

 

 

 

I’m interviewed on DNA Weekly

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I had the pleasure last month of being interviewed via Zoom for the website DNA Weekly. The interviewer, Ditsa Keren, transcribed and edited the interview, and it’s presented in print form. Here’s the link if you’d like to read it: Organize Your Family History for Future Generations.

I don’t do much with genetic genealogy so I was a little surprised to be asked, but I was happy to talk about organizing traditional genealogy. And I shared my views on genetic genealogy.

DNA Weekly looks like a great resource for those interested in genetic genealogy. In addition to its blog (where my interview appears as well as interviews with others), it offers reviews of different testing platforms and weighs in on what it considers the best testing kits for various types of DNA tests.

I hope you enjoy the interview!

New + improved search capability

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I don’t know if you noticed, but a few months ago the Search field disappeared from this blog. I think it was the result of a WordPress update (or perhaps a theme update), but it up and vanished.

I set up and maintain Organize Your Family History on my own but I’m far from a WordPress expert and my efforts to figure out what had happened flailed. Figuring it out was on my task list forever and, finally, I decided to purchase Jetpack Search so that readers would once again be able to search for topics of interest on this site.

In implementing Jetpack Search, I learned that I could no longer use the old location for the Search. (It used to be up at the top, to the right of the menu items.) I’ve now located it in the right sidebar, between my photo and the tag cloud.

I’m excited that the new Jetpack Search is more robust than the old default search used to be. When you search on a term, an overlay window comes up that shows your results, including results that appeared in comments (shown just below the post to which the comment was made). When you’re finished, you just click the X at the top right of the screen to go back to the blog page. Another thing I’m happy about is that, as with Google, if you mistype a word it will try to figure out what you meant. For example, I accidentally typed “Barru” and the search results for “Barry” (my husband’s name) appeared.

If you were inconvenienced by the absence of a Search field for a number of months, I apologize and I thank you for not complaining. I hope you find the new, more robust, search capability helpful!

Join the mailing list!

When you first join the list, I’ll send you a few emails to help you organize your family history. After that you’ll hear from me at the end of every month when I send an email with links to that month’s posts. And every now and then, I’ll let you know when I have something special to promote.