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Effective Use of Ancestry.com

Join us for a FREE virtual program on November 13 at 6:30 p.m. ET!

I clicked all those little green leaves and built my tree, but I keep finding mistakes. How do I fix them? This presentation will show you how to avoid incorporating other people’s mistakes into your tree and use the Ancestry.com service effectively. It will teach techniques for building a more reliable, evidence-based tree.

Scott Lee is a professional genealogist and retired software engineering consultant who has researched his family history since 1979. He has served as an officer in several genealogical societies and lectures on genealogical topics with a focus on technology. Currently, he serves as president of the Arkansas Genealogical Society and is a member of the Association of Professional Genealogists and the Genealogical Speakers Guild. In 1995, he helped design the GEDCOM 5.5 standard for transporting genealogical data, improving its syntax to be more easily read by software and fixing several issues in date specifications. He created the calendar conversion website rosettacalendar.com, which is used by historical researchers to convert among various ancient dating systems. His date manipulation library (sdncal20) is utilized by many software packages, powering date, and calendar operations in hundreds of millions of websites (more than half of all websites). Scott grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas, but his work took him to Indiana, Oregon, North Carolina, and New York City. In retirement, he and his wife, Deirdre, have returned to their families in Arkansas. His career spanned the medical field, computer graphics algorithm design, graphical interface systems, and consulting at Fortune 500 companies, where he trained their developers in techniques to produce more reliable software. In retirement, he lectures on genealogy topics and works on the design of deep-learning neural networks and software for genealogy. In his spare time, he enjoys writing science fiction, studying ancient calendars, developing open-source software, keeping up with the latest advances in astrophysics, and, of course, researching his family history.