GenealogiaSureste 444 Four family history techno-gizmos presented at BYU workshop

Four family history techno-gizmos presented at BYU workshop

By Michael De Groote

Mormon Times
Published: 2010-04-29 00:23:55

SALT LAKE CITY -- Away from the crush of anxious genealogists carrying brand-new shamrock-green bags (the bags are official issue at the National Genealogical Society 2010 Family History Conference, are big enough to hold an encyclopedia and are recyclable). Down the hallways, run up a long ramp and then down an escalator. Slowly it gets quieter as I approach BYU's Family History Technology Workshop 2010 held in the Salt Palace on the opening day of the NGS conference.

I'm there to see the demo session where some new family history-related technology will be displayed and explained. Four people talk about their products, then demo them at the back of the room.

First up is Peter Ivie of AllMyCousins.com. Ivie's company has a new product that creates a map of where a person's ancestors were at different times -- a picture of a person's ancestor's progress and life. Evan Ivie calls it a "genealogical time line." The computer shows a map with numbers representing various people in the 1600s. At the top of the screen is the year -- 1624. As it advances to 1625, numbers that were in Europe pop over to America -- leaving colorful lines showing the connection and pathway.

Joshua Taylor shows off ReadyMicro's new low-cost microfilm digitization solution. It is a cool little machine that automatically takes digital photographs of microfilm. Unlike some more expensive models, this one optimizes each individual photograph. Each image takes about four seconds -- so it isn't the fastest volume machine, but the cost and size are small. In addition to scanning, it also will perform optical character recognition (OCR), indexing and even search engine optimization. If I had microfilm, I would want one.

Next, David Wiggins tells about the straightforwardly named Name Date and Place Extractor software. (Try to resist calling it the NDP Extractor.) The open source project identifies names, dates, and places in websites and text files and creates an index. Wiggins hopes to eventually make it into a Firefox browser plugin.

Grant Wood works for Intermountain Healthcare's Clinical Genetics Institute at LDS Hospital. He says that knowing family medical history is helpful for doctors. Intermountain is developing an online-base form to enter this information for patients. The prototype even allows people to upload a Gedcom file from their family history software. He says the program isn't finished, and is looking for feedback.

I want to find out more about the different products -- but the next presentation has already begun and I have to sit down. Technology moves fast.

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E-mail: mdegroote@desnews.com

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Website:  http://www.Genealogia.org.mx
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"Haz tu Arbol Genealogico...El Arbol mas Hermoso de la Creacion"


Por medio de la historia familiar descubrimos el árbol más hermoso de la creación: nuestro árbol genealógico. Sus numerosas raíces se remontan a la historia y sus ramas se extienden a través de la eternidad. La historia familiar es la expresión extensiva del amor eterno; nace de la abnegación y provee la oportunidad de asegurarse para siempre una unidad familiar".
(Élder J. Richard Clarke, Liahona julio de 1989, pág.69)

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