St. Augustine Genealogical Society

03/16/2026

Recent speaker, Kate Penney Howard, has written a super summary of RootsTech for those of us who weren't able to attend.

RootsTech 2026: Ten Things That Made My Jaw Drop
By Kate Penney Howard www.katepenneyhoward.com RootsTech 2026 wrapped up on March 7. The theme was "Together," but the unofficial theme was clearly artificial intelligence. AI crashed the party at every forum, every expo booth, and most of the talks. Here are the ten announcements and moments that had people excited.

1. FamilyTreeDNA Rewrote the Rules on Autosomal Testing
FamilyTreeDNA launched new Family Finder tests that analyze over 400 times the genetic data of their previous version -- roughly 9% of your genome compared to just 0.02% before. The best news? Upcoming Family Finder Discover reports will be available to all Family Finder test takers, whether they tested recently or years ago.

2. GEDmatch is Getting a Complete Overhaul
GEDmatch has been the scrappy workhorse of the genetic genealogy world for years. The company previewed a major redesign planned for later in 2026, incorporating AI-powered tools to help users interpret DNA matches and make organizing, filtering, tagging, and analyzing notes far easier. This has been a long time coming.

3. FamilySearch Released Its AI Tools from the Lab
For months, genealogists have been testing FamilySearch AI features in beta. At RootsTech, the AI Research Assistant and AI Hints officially came out of Labs and are now available to all users. Full-Text Search also graduated from Labs, and users can now attach search results directly to the family tree.

4. FamilySearch Is Testing Natural Language Search
If you have ever wished you could just talk to a database like a person, this one is for you. Simple Search, currently in Labs, is being tested to allow users to search records using natural language. Ask it a question the way you would ask a librarian. See what it tells you!
5. All Revolutionary War Pension Files Are Now Fully Searchable
Ancestry announced that its Fold3 collection of Revolutionary War pension files are now fully searchable thanks to optical character recognition. Researchers can now search for veterans and their next of kin by name, rather than relying on a limited index. For those of us working on pre-1800 American genealogy, this is a genuine breakthrough. They also announced new AI features, including a record and document transcription tool where AI transcribes, summarizes, and provides source citations for documents and photos uploaded to your Gallery.

6. Ancestry Introduced "AI Stories" -- And It's Exactly What It Sounds Like
A new tool called AI Stories narrates a brief story about a document in a shareable, podcast-style audio file. The possibilities here for people who struggle to write about their ancestors are significant. It could be a meaningful bridge for beginners. It raises questions about voice and accuracy that researchers will need to monitor carefully, but the concept is compelling.

7. LifeWeaver Crashed the Party as a Platinum Sponsor
No one saw this one coming. Newcomer LifeWeaver made a significant splash as platinum sponsor of RootsTech 2026. The tool archives and searches through text messages, emails and other digital communication files to create a story from those pieces. LifeWeaver also allows users to add older phones, computers, hard drives, and scanned handwritten journals, digitizing their contents while preserving images of the originals so they can be shared with family. And critically, users' data is private. The company does not sell data or use it to train AI models.

8. MyHeritage Unveiled Scribe AI
MyHeritage announced Scribe AI at the RootsTech Innovation Forum, demonstrating how the feature analyzes historical documents and photos to uncover genealogical insights. The tool provides record suggestions, photo descriptions, and transcriptions. The MyHeritage team also announced Country Coding, a feature that helps sort and organize international records and visualize your ancestors by country.

9. Ancestry Preserve Wants to Digitize Your Shoeboxes
The new Ancestry Preserve service, heavily featured in the Expo Hall, aims to help customers preserve and digitize their old media, including photographs, slides, film tapes, and more. For genealogists who have inherited closets full of analog memories, this fills a real need. The long-term implications for family history are significant. Your grandmother's slides deserve better than a dark box in a garage.

10. Marlee Matlin and Tara Roberts Reminded Us What This Is All For
The technology announcements were remarkable. But these two keynotes stopped the room. Marlee Matlin, Academy Award-winning actress, shared her inspiring journey of overcoming obstacles and connecting personal triumphs to family history. As a deaf actor, she did not utter a word, but her facial expressions, animated signing, and story had audiences listening with their eyes and hearts. Tara Roberts, National Geographic explorer, shared her extraordinary work documenting slave ship wrecks and reconnecting descendants with their ancestral past.

RootsTech 2026 made one thing clear. The technology is accelerating faster than most of us can keep up. The challenge for our community is to stay human in the middle of all of it. The records are the beginning. The stories are the point.

03/16/2026

Quick PS to Saturday's meeting: members can view John Grenham's presentation on our website behind our paywall in the Members' section. Do it by Tuesday and you can take advantage of the 33% discount he's offering on access to his site.

St Augustine Genealogical Society

03/14/2026

See you tomorrow, we hope.
Meantime here's some solid advice from Family Tree Magazine

Determine if the information you find in online family trees (such as those at Ancestry.com, FamilySearch and MyHeritage) is accurate.

03/09/2026

Interesting idea from MyHeritage

A family tree often tells a rich story, but it isn't always easy to see the geographical aspects of the story at a quick glance. To help you better To help you better visualize your family history, we’ve added country coding for family trees, which displays flags for individuals in your family tre...

03/06/2026

We are lucky to have not one but two FamilySearch Centers in St Johns County. I promised to post directions to each one. So here's the one on County Route 210 in the North West of the County:

Visit St Johns Florida FamilySearch Center. Get access to personalized help, technology, and exclusive resources to aid your family history journey.

03/06/2026

We are lucky to have not one but two FamilySearch Centers in St Johns County. I promised to post directions to each one. So here's the one in The Shores development South of St Augustine:

Visit St Augustine Florida FamilySearch Center. Get access to personalized help, technology, and exclusive resources to aid your family history journey.

03/05/2026

It's not often we get to publicize a local event, other than ours! The Palatka Family Search Center and Putnam Genealogical Society will have a booth again this year at the Putnam County Fair starting at 5 pm March 20. Opens at 5 on weekdays and noon on weekends. Closes on Saturday March 29.
The fair grounds are located on South Highway 17 in East Palatka

03/05/2026

RootsTech announcements have just started!

We’re excited to introduce Scribe AI, a powerful new feature on MyHeritage that transcribes, translates, and interprets historical family documents and

03/04/2026

Stand by for RootsTech, people. It starts officially tomorrow, though I believe there are one or two sessions tonight.

Do you have relatives attending? Yesterday I had 660. Twelve hours later it's 700, including one third cousin - not bad for a Brit! I'm sure you can beat that!

Now, FamilySearch also tells me that I'm related to a dozen famous people, including Queen Elizabeth, FDR, Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, Lucille Ball and Martha Washington. OK, that's all paper-based research and needs to be checked. To me, what's more surprising is that every single connection comes from only one of my 16 great-great grandparents, one of the few that didn't hail from Norfolk.

So, what can you discover?

03/02/2026

Swedish ancestors? You may be interested in this:

If you have Swedish heritage, some of the most important records for tracing your family are now fully available on MyHeritage. We’ve completed the

02/27/2026

"What DNA Uncovered That Family Lore Hid", written by our speaker for February, Kate Penney Howard:
These stories aren't usually lies, exactly. They're something more" complicated than that...they are curated truths. They are the version of the past that allowed a family to survive intact, emotionally and socially, in a specific time and place.
And then DNA entered the room.
For many genealogists, the DNA test was supposed to confirm what the family already knew. Instead, it raised questions the family had never asked. The ethnicity percentages didn't quite add up. A close match appeared who shared no name, no geography, no known connection. An expected second cousin was nowhere in the results, but a stranger from three states away shared enough centimorgans to be a half-sibling.
These moments can feel like a betrayal. It's worth sitting with why.
Family lore exists for reasons that are entirely human. Protective silence shields children from information judged too painful or too dangerous to carry: the out-of-wedlock birth, the problematic death, the ancestor who passed as another ethnicity or persona.
generations. What grandmother told mother and what mother told you went through two translations before it reached your ears, and each translator edited according to their own emotional priorities. Identity-building narratives exist because people need to know who they are and where they come from, and an incomplete or painful history doesn't always provide a livable answer. So families build one.
The moment DNA complicates that story, genealogists experience a mix of emotions that don't often get acknowledged in the excitement of a big discovery. Yes, there's excitement. But there's also grief, for the story that no longer fits, for the ancestor who carried a secret, for the family that may not look the same on the other side of this discovery. There can be anger, especially when the secret involved someone who made choices that had consequences for people who never consented. And sometimes there is relief, quiet and real: finally, an explanation for the thing that never quite made sense.
The reframe that matters most is this: family lore and DNA evidence aren't simply competing truth-claims, with one being right and one being wrong. Family lore is emotional truth. It tells you what a family needed to believe about itself. DNA evidence is biological truth. It tells you what actually happened in the bodies of the people who came before you. Both kinds of truth are real. Neither cancels the other.
And your family's "received truth" matters. Before you pick up the phone to tell a cousin about an NPE, ask yourself what you know, what you're inferring, and what you're still guessing. Ask yourself who else will be affected by this information and whether they've chosen to be part of this discovery process. Some questions can be pursued quietly for a long time before they need to be shared. Others land in someone's inbox before they've had a single moment to prepare. The concept of "Right to Know" is about the choices of recipient of the information...otherwise, we would say, "Right to Tell."
Compassion for ancestors who kept secrets isn't the same as excusing the secrets. It's the recognition that they lived in a specific historical moment with specific social consequences, and they made choices, sometimes terrible ones, sometimes heartbreaking ones, within the constraints of that moment.
DNA doesn't erase your family story, it gives it more pages. The story that emerges may be harder. It is almost certainly truer. And it belongs to you, all of it, including the parts that were hidden.
What did your DNA reveal that the story didn't?
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