Family Tree Magazine’s contributing editor and technology guru Rick Crume crashed the Brigham Young University Computerized Genealogy Conference  last weekend in Provo, Utah.

He reports more than 700 attendees absorbed nearly 100 presentations and explored a large exhibit area. Here's what Rick had to say about developments he uncovered there:

FamilySearch makeover update
The revamped Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ Family History Library Web site, still in the testing stage, is gradually being rolled out to the church’s temple districts around the world. It’ll be open to the general public once data security issues are addressed.

“New” FamilySearch offers collaboration, multimedia and improved searching. It’ll attempt to consolidate all the family information located in several databases on “old” FamilySearch.

As a shared database open for users to collaborate on, the new FamilySearch is fundamentally different from the current site, which doesn’t let you alter data someone else submitted. You’ll be able to submit information to the new site in GEDCOM format, but you can’t download data as a GEDCOM.

Working with other service providers is the new site’s strong suit. Several genealogy programs, including Ancestral Quest, Legacy Family Tree and RootsMagic (but not Family Tree Maker or FamilySearch’s own Personal Ancestral File), will let you synchronize the family files on your computer with New FamilySearch. And you’ll be able to use these programs free at Family History Centers for three years.

Progeny’s Charting Companion utilities  will combine family information from the renewed site with photos from another site to create a photo family tree chart. And Generations Maps will let you order a chart made from names on the new FamilySearch.

Work is underway to digitize the Family History Library’s collection. FamilySearch Labs' Record Search already lets you search millions of indexed names.

How many searches was that?
Tim Sullivan, president and CEO of The Generations Network, rattled off a string of statistics on his company, whose divisions include Ancestry.com, RootsWeb, MyFamily.com and Genealogy.com.

Amazingly, Genealogy.com still ranks as the third most popular genealogy Web site, even though TGN virtually abandoned the site after acquiring it several years ago.

Sullivan noted Ancestry.com processes 20 million search requests a day. TGN has invested almost $69 million to digitize records over the past 10 years; $10 million a year now goes toward digitization. In the works: scanning some of the National Archives’ 9 billion undigitized documents.

Sullivan emphasized RootsWeb will remain free despite the change in its domain name to rootsweb.ancestry.com.

From the genealogy social networking front ...
Genealogy social networking sites are multiplying like crazy. Geni now has a million registered users. A new entrant in the field, Family Pursuit, lets you and your relatives use a Web-based genealogy program to collaborate on family history research.

Findmypast.com’s upgraded online family tree, PedigreeSoft, will debut in two or three months with a new URL, www.familytreeexplorer.com.

And some new products and services

• Family Photoloom, which should be available this month, lets you tag faces in photos and link them to genealogical data

• Heritage Collector lets you organize your digital photos, label people in them and create family history scrapbooks

• Biographywiki.com is a wiki that accepts biographies of anyone, famous or not, but the person must be deceased

• USFamilyTree.com, coming in April, aims to make tracking down your ancestors’ descendants more efficient.

Where better to hold a genealogy gathering than the backyard of America’s first permanent English colony?

For this year’s National Genealogical Society (NGS) conference, last week in Richmond, Va., organizers joined in Jamestown’s 400th anniversary celebration: The keynote session explored virtual resources for studying Jamestown’s history, and a descendant of settler John Rolfe and Pocahontas entertained the banquet audience.

With nearby Civil War battlefields, Revolutionary-era sites and Colonial Willliamsburg, Richmond proved a popular location—around 2,000 genealogists reportedly attended the conference this year, up from recent years’ turnout.

Those who stopped by the Family History Fair in the Richmond Convention Center learned of new and forthcoming genealogical products and services. If you didn’t make it—or missed the announcements—here’s the scoop:

• Visitors to the Family History Library’s booth got a sneak peek at the revamped search interface coming to the FamilySearch Web site. The new system not only integrates information from FamilySearch’s various databases, its results also will link to digitized records—though only a tiny fraction of the library’s vast holdings will be available when the site relaunches this fall. (But more record images will be coming online soon: See “Not-So-Silent Partners.”) Booth workers also showed off the easy-to-use FamilySearch Indexing  system—built to help volunteers index the library’s billions of records for eventual online searching. Indexing efforts have ramped up recently; the 1900 census is now in progress (view the list of current projects).

• Several software manufacturers demonstrated new versions of genealogy programs. Incline Software’s Ancestral Quest 12, for example, adds the ability to input DNA testing results and a summary screen for each individual in your file, among other improvements. Version 12 costs $29.95, or you can upgrade for $19.95. Incline also showed off version 2 of PAFWiz, a $24.95 companion to the free Personal Ancestral File software. Look for a review of both programs in the November 2007 Family Tree Magazine.

• GenSmarts 2, a $29.95 utility that analyzes your data and suggests next steps, lets you save and export your reports to more file formats (including PDF). It also introduces new reports and the ability to analyze only selected parts of your file. If you purchased the program this year, you get a free upgrade—earlier purchasers get a $10 discount.

• Ancestry.com staffers previewed a soon-to-come edition of Family Tree Maker, produced by parent company The Generations Network. If you use Family Tree Maker, you can expect a significant makeover in the next upgrade. The company also promoted Ancestry Press, an online service that will automatically create a book from your family tree on Ancestry.com.

The biggest news from NGS was the announcement of several partnerships to make more ancestral data and records available to you online—read “Not-So-Silent Partners” for more on this.