2024-12 Dec - Talk Your Story

Dec 8, 2024 family history WhisperAI Eternal Perspective Data Quality glass storage

Read time: Summary 0.2 minutes | Expanded section: 8.1 minutes | Entire message 8.3 minutes

Summary

Expanded Message

Talk and Get Your Family History Stories

After seeing an ad for Ghost Writers to help people write their family history, it made me pause.

If anyone in the Ward wants to record their stories on their mobile phone or digital recording device (with low background noise), I can help you get a free transcription from Whisper AI.

I’ve already tested the feasibility by doing it for my wife’s mother already. I ran it locally on a seven-year old computer (ancient in technology years-sort of like dog years).

Contact me if you’re more interested in the verbal history keeping than typing stuff on a computer keyboard.

Establish a Family Stories Month to encourages people in your family to share and learn about your family’s history and people. It helps you feel more connected to your loved ones, and your roots.

Some families take this month as an opportunity to document their family stories through writing, audio, or video recordings, preserving their family history for generations to come. Family Stories Month emphasizes the importance of fostering inter-generational connections and keeping familial ties alive.

If you have old magnetic cassette tape recordings, I’m not sure how to digitize that and I don’t have a player. But if you get it digitized without the noises old tape players added, I can help you have Whisper AI transcribe it for you.

On Amazon, I saw an inflatable ball with Family History interview questions. The idea seemed to be that you toss the ball to your Grandma and they answer the question. Be careful with the reflexes expectations.

Have You Ever Felt Abandoned? Help others not to feel that way.

When I was a small youngster, my family stopped for dinner somewhere on a trip away from home. I got separated somehow, and the rest of my family got in the car and drove away. This was in the days before mobile phones existed.

I felt so alone. I sat down on the stairs in front of the entrance and I cried. Fortunately for me (and my frantic mother), my bad experience only lasted about 20 minutes as they realized I was not in the car and drove back. It was a tearful and happy reunion.

I don’t want any of my ancestors or cousins to feel that way. If they need me to help on the mortal side of the veil, then I will take some of my time to help them.

Do you have anyone in your family who might feel left out? What can we do for them?

Pause for an Eternal Perspective - Look How Far Your Family Has Come

Small things becoming great things. Look at how our lives have played out so far. Look with gratitude at how our loved ones, and children have impacted our lives and the world around them. Ponder that for a moment and let it push away feelings of being overwhelmed in the urgency of the now. Applying an eternal view can adjust our filter and help see the positive.

The work of Family History can be far less time-consuming and tedious today than 3-4 decades ago. What have each of us done with the time saved? I’ve spent more time on Cousin lines. How about you? All those groups of 5 minutes can add up over time.

At that very moment it is needed, the Lord provides this data or technology to handle it ~ Elder Hamilton

We’ve been working on the family tree for 130 years

Family Search is the largest genealogy organization in the world.

The Progress Timeline

Note how the Temple & Family History work has been blessed by the technology advances, which have allowed the work to scale to the level needed to support over 300 temples worldwide.

Family history research and temple service are one work in this Church. We cannot do vicarious work for our progenitors unless we know who they are. Temples are nourished with names. Without genealogies, ordinances could be performed only for the living.

~ President Russell M. Nelson

With 367 houses of the Lord operating, announced or under construction worldwide, the main mission of FamilySearch is to “nourish temples with names Elder Hamilton & Elder Rockwood

The New Data Quality Measure

Familysearch.org has a new Data Quality Measure

The Data Quality Score in Family Tree is intended to give us confidence in the sources and information about our ancestors. It can help you find areas of improvement or signal errors and inconsistencies in our family trees.

It is a provided by software that combs through the data associated with a person in Family Tree and performs hundreds of detailed checks.

Another instance of the tools getting better and better. The tooling for Temple & Family History are so much better now than when I first joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

Roots Tech

AI’s Role in Record-Keeping

As people try to understand what it is and what it can and cannot yet do, it’s important to verify with human eyes. “Artificial intelligence… is kind of easier for research, but it actually opens some other challenges for us. Because how are we going to know that what is put together is actually right?” said Dr. Comacho-Zapata. Curators must be vigilant and check AI-produced databases for accuracy with the understanding that AI output is not perfect.

Used appropriately, AI has and will continue to revolutionize their efforts through indexing, translating, auditing, and creating family trees.

At FamilySearch, AI has been implemented to identify words in old, handwritten records. FamilySearch first used this technology on handwritten Spanish records. Humans then review the records to help improve accuracy.

AI has also become invaluable to help provide FamilySearch users with online hints by matching records to people they may apply to in the system. AI is “trained” to give correct answers at least 90% of the time before it can be used successfully to help guide guests to the right records.

The outlook for the future is huge. Generative AI already helps with digitizing, indexing, and creating stories, but there will be much more.

source

Story Time

Could your data be stored in glass for over 1,000 years?

This is not home storage mason jars, but a different type of glass storage. See this interesting video, Storing data for thousands of years | Microsoft Project Silica

Benefits:

Reminder. Current Workflow for Family History:

Think Inputs and Outputs.

  1. Historical people’s information first has to be digitized (others do this).
  2. We index people’s digitized information so the image can be associated with text, which can be found in computer searches. AI is still not good enough to do this by itself.
  3. We link families' data together in FamilySearch.org (each member’s initial target is 4-Generations found and linked. Later we work cousin lines too.)
  4. We attach people’s information (source data) to the right person to help us and others to get to know them better. Attaching more sources also shows our hypotheses about individuals more likely true than not true as we build a clear picture of who they were.
  5. Then, we can get names to take to the temple and offer them the choice of being linked to their families for eternity.
  6. By delving deeper, finding and attaching sources and their small bits of information about our ancestor’s experiences, we get to know our people (both direct lines and cousin lines), and our hearts turn to them. As more original sources are digitized and indexed, more puzzle pieces become available. It’s an ongoing and accelerating effort. When are we “done” knowing someone? We can all go beyond the dates of their birth and death and get to know our people.
  7. We can bless others by sharing with our immediate family and cousins what we’ve learned about our shared ancestors or kin, helping all of us feel more grounded, knowing where we came from. Potentially helping them to turn their hearts to their fathers too.

As Ward Temple & Family History Consultants we are called to help you with HOW to do these things, the Lord has asked that we all do.

Sincerely, Your Ward Temple & Family History Consultants,

During Stake Family Search Center posted hours, our staffing assignments are posted

(our contact info is in the tools app, or see us in church)