RootsTech

 

 

The last day of RootsTech is always a busy one because of Family Discovery Day and it is also sad because it is almost over. The Keynote Speakers today were CeCe Moore and Buddy Valastro aka “The Cake Boss.”

 

Before each of the Keynote sessions started Jason Hewlett would come on stage to warm up the audience. He was fantastic and so much fun. Music and laughter woke up the audience who had to be ready for the opening cheer. On Saturday he introduced us to the Genea-gecko. I guess every living thing has an interest in where they came from.

 

 

Ancestry started the session with an announcement about how AncestryDNA will be going beyond ethnicity to find community. They are going to use the information from DNA to try and create communities and see where the people may have originated. They will add historic and political information to explain why there may have been mass migration in recent times.

 

 

CeCe Moore was next and she didn’t disappoint. If you have never heard CeCe speak then check out her session on the RootsTech Saturday Sessions page. She talked about how our genealogy is coming alive through DNA and how our experience and those of our ancestors will always be found in our DNA. My main take away was that now people are starting their family history journey by doing a DNA test and then following the paper trail. This is a reversal of how it used to be done.

Did you ever set foot in a country and feel like you were home? CeCe said that there is a connection between a biological relative and an ancestral location. She believes that DNA passes down genetic memories of places, personal choices and creative ideas. She spoke of how DNA has brought forgiveness and healing to families. It is important to know the roots your family installed in you to make you who you are today. Looking ahead in DNA CeCe believes that in 10 years we will be able to reverse engineer our ancestors DNA. We will be able to see what they looked like.

 

 

 

Up next was Buddy Valastro and he spoke about the ancestral journeys of his family, how they arrived from Italy, went back and then came back to America. He talked about how the family dinner table was a time to share your day and family stories. I remember this as part of my childhood but it seems to be disappearing in today’s busy world.

 

Buddy also spoke on one of the themes of RootsTech and that was family food traditions. Passing on family recipes is an important part of our family history.  He has never forgotten where he came from and that has helped him build his business and raise his family.

 

 

Buddy Valastro had an extra job at RootsTech as he was a judge for the Cake Competition. There were four categories: Wedding, Birthday, Holiday and Graduation. There were three finalists and one grand prize in each category. There was also a People’s Choice. The Deseret News has an article about the winners.

 

The lab I attended today was “Create Genealogy Videos and Images Quickly for Free with Spark.” I have had this app on my iPad for a while but didn’t know how to use it so this helped me focus and now I am looking to create my first video. Maybe I will do it with photos from RootsTech and post it online? Shannon Combs-Bennett was the lecturer and she had people in the room to help if we got stuck. Again this hands on lab helped me get comfortable with a new program and that is always a good thing.

 

 

Family Discovery Day is a very busy day at RootsTech. There are special events and sessions on for the Members of the LDS Church and it is fun to watch the children enjoying family history. Some were on a treasure hunt and wanted pictures with some of us who had long ribbons on our badges. We were all busy collection them from each other and vendors during the conference. One person was unbeatable. Still some of us had to start adding them down the side or going so long then starting again at the top behind the first row. Here is a shot of mine. I couldn’t get it all in the picture.

 

You can view the Saturday live streaming on the RootsTech website.

© 2017 Blair Archival Research – All Rights Reserved

 

Friday was another early start. Friday was the very first African American Day at RootsTech. The Keynotes started off with an announcement from Findmypast. They have updated the US Marriage Collection. It is the largest collection of US marriages ever published. There are nearly 70 million records available online.

 

 

Findmypast have partnered with Twile who have created a family history infographic. All you have to do is upload your gedcom to the Twile website. It is free.

 

 

The last announcement from Findmypast was the Catholic Heritage Archive. They are digitizing the records from the Archdioceses of New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore. There will eventually be Catholic records from Ireland included in this database.

 

 

The Keynote speaker today was LeVar Burton and everyone wanted to hear him speak. We weren’t disappointed. His keynote was eloquent and emotional. He had the audience in tears. You could feel the power of his passion in the room. His Mother was a huge influence in his life and when FamilySearch presented him with his Mother’s family history he was visibly moved.

 

 

 

The Ambassadors has an opportunity to interview him but his keynote will not be available online due to contract restrictions.

The Innovators Showdown Finals were held right after the General Session on Friday. The winner was OldNews USA. Second place went to QromaTag and third place went to Canada’s own Double Match Triangulator. The People’s Choice was Kindex.

The lecture I attended today was “Go Paperless: Digitize & Streamline Your Research” with Janine Adams and Brooks Duncan. Janine Adams writes the Organize Your Family History blog and Brooks Duncan is from British Columbia and dealt with the technical side. It was a very interesting lecture and I am starting to get things in place to get some of my family history digitized. I will not go completely paperless as I like to be able to touch and read documents. I have difficulty reading some digitized documents.

 

In the Evening it was the Culture Celebration: Celebrate Your Heritage in the Expo Hall. It was open to 7 pm and the place was filled with music from many different countries around the world. I went to the Genealogy Gems booth and watched Journaling and Scrapbooking with Amie Tennant. Got some great tips from this one. You can watch some of the demo hall lectures on the Genealogy Gems Podcast Facebook page.

 

Friday night was the MyHeritage After Party and I had heard great things from people who had attended last year. It did not disappoint. This party was a lot of fun. They had games to play in order to win tickets for the door prizes. Things like bouncing pencils into cups and using a straw to pile up bolts one of top of the other just to name a few. Some of these were really hard and after a few tries they gave you a ticket for trying. If you did it you got extra tickets. There was karaoke and they had some wonderful mock cocktails. There was a picture booth where we could have a little fun with props and when we were leaving they gave us a neck cushion for the plane ride home.

I spent most of Thursday and Friday walking around the Expo Hall. I knew that there were a lot of attendees expected for Family Discovery Day and that the Expo Hall would be busy. I was able to wander and talk to vendors about their products and ask questions. I will talk about the Expo Hall in another post.

Friday Live Streaming Sessions

© 2017 Blair Archival Research – All Rights Reserved

 

Wednesday was the Innovator Summit. This was the technological side of the conference. The Keynote Speaker was Liz Wiseman and she was a fantastic speaker. She was inspirational. The main takeaway from her keynote was “a rookie moment.” A rookie moment is a time when you are doing something brand new and have no experience with the project. You take baby steps and ask lots of questions so your knowledge base grows and you gain your experience. Is there a job/project where you didn’t know what you were doing but you jumped in anyway and succeeded? Liz had us share a rookie moment with the person beside us. The person beside me was a chap from Vancouver BC who was there to do research on an idea he has for a future Innovator Summit.

Liz Wiseman provided questions to answer to help us focus on those moments. Rookie moments provide a feeling of discomfort in us which is a catalyst to help us grow. She encouraged us to throw away our notes and to ask naïve questions. Ask the questions of a toddler – Why? How? Who says? We need to surf with the amateurs and learn something new.

 

You can watch Liz Wiseman’s keynote on the RootsTech website.

 

The next session was Innovation and Industry Trends. This was the expert panel discussion. The panel consisted of Ben Bennett; Craig Bott, Grow Utah; Heather Holmes, TapGenes; Nick Jones, JRNL, Inc; Robert Kehrer, FamilySearch.

 

 

The principles to keep in mind are: differentiate; build products that people want; don’t reinvent the wheel; and sharing is caring.

 

TapGenes, last year’s winner of the Innovator Showdown, have a new app called Genivity which connects health and health care costs. It helps people balance both issues.

 

 

Robert Kehrer from FamilySearch said that there will be a greater need for indexers in the future. New items that are coming are fuzzy search advancements and process innovation.

 

 

Next it was the Innovator Showdown semi-finals. The semi-finalists were: JoyFlips a photo archiver for your devices; Cuzins app; Crowd Sourced Indexing – CSI a transcription project management tools for societies and user groups; Kindex which gathers records into a single digital archives where you can transcribe, tag records and eventually share it; Roots Finder app which makes it easy to share and expand your family history with other family members; Champollion 2.0 manages archival or ancient documents; Emberall is a mobile app that will help you record, organize, store and share life stories; Canada’s own Double Match Triangulator which combines two different chromosome browser results to give you the Double Match Triangulator information; QuormaTag allows you to add a date, location and people that are found in a digital picture; OldNews USA uses the Library of Congress Chronicling America collection. It create suggestions on where you may find some information. When you view the page the search term is highlighted. The app automatically zooms into the next match. It seemed like the judges had a hard decision to make.

 

The next session I attended was a panel discussion entitled: How will DNA Continue to Disrupt Our Industry? The panel were CeCe Moore, Angie Bush, and Dr. Scott Woodward. Now people go straight to DNA before doing the paper research. DNA tells us things the paper trail can’t. DNA can help those who do not have access to their genealogy. Everyone will find an end to the paper trail but the DNA trail will go on. There is still a huge demand and need for DNA educational resources. We have been carrying the DNA markers from our family tree for 1000 years. The more people you have triangulating a common ancestor the better. Ideally what we want to do is map out the chromosomes of the DNA matches and be told exactly who the common ancestor is but we are not able to do that – yet!

 

My last session of the day was: Organizing your Genealogy Files and Correspondence with Drew Smith. The room filled up quickly and he started the presentation but five minutes into it they found a larger room and we moved there to finish up the session. Design your own systems for organizing but there are some basic principles. The main one is to keep it simple. Paper, computer files, binders or a combination of any of them – it is up to you. When organizing your binder organize by first name then chronologically. Once you decide on your filing system it will still continue to evolve and change.

 

 

Wednesday night was the RootsTech Welcome Party. It was great fun and the finalists of the Innovator Showdown were announced. They were: Champollion 2.0; Double Match Triangulator; Emberall; Kindex; OldNews USA.

 

You can view Wednesday live streaming on the RootsTech website.

© 2017 Blair Archival Research – All Rights Reserved