Writing the story of an ancestor’s military service can help us better understand their experiences. Correlating the records marking their service, the ancestor’s recollections, and historical context provides a fuller picture than any one of those three items alone. This process can also lead us on the hunt for additional records. For this Memorial Day post, I decided to use Artificial Intelligence to help correlate my father’s World War II Navy records with his...
FamilySearch introduced a new tool at RootsTech 2026 called “Simple Search.” The webpage entices us with the statement: “Search billions of full-text images using everyday phrases-no search form required.” Find Simple Search from the home page of FamilySearch under FamilySearch Labs > View Experiments. If you’ve never visited the FamilySearch Labs page, you’ll see several experiments that are in testing phases. The screenshot below shows three of the eight experiments currently in the labs. When...
On this Father’s Day, I’ve been reminiscing about my dad, Bobby Gene Shults. He was one of the “greatest generation” who served in World War II and went on to build a life and raise a family afterward. He wrote his own life history, which is filled with stories about the Dust Bowl, the Great Depression, and his adventures as a young boy in Texas, Oklahoma, and California. When we visited, he’d tell those stories...
