RootsTech Day 3 - for reals this time

and that's a wrap, folks!

Yes, this really is Day 3 - math is definitely not my strong point!

Today did not disappoint - I had an early morning specialty topic class that felt like they were teaching exactly what I needed to hear! Sometimes I’m just in the right place at the right time. An adorable couple of researchers from Wales started my mind planning my new research question to tackle. The Irish and German classes on either side of mine were FULL. Looked like everyone was ready for Day 3! I’m glad I’m not the only one with more to learn! Cousins 1-3 in that class. I also saw a sweet friend from FamilySearch’s book scanning team, it was good to connect with her again!

I managed to catch a few more music groups today - hiphop cloggers, a cowbell group that used audience members and an accordion player with a gorgeous version of Edelwiess. While in the Expo Hall, I chatted with a slide scanning equipment vendor, a genealogy degree college educator, am online photo storage vendor and One Kind Act a Day rep (got a free tshirt - fun!).

I realized that I didn’t get an Ancestry shirt, but I can order it later on their merch store. I discovered some gorgeous family trees on display around the RootsTech Park - and when I say OLD, I mean OLDOLDOLD.

Digging Deep into Archives and Special Collections class was next, followed by a jaunt in the VR experience area. We looked up Jonjong Sweden, Tatum New Mexico and Sagada Philippines. Virtual reality put us right in those heritage ‘hometowns’, and it was beyond cool!

The next stop was a meetup with my 4th Ogle cousin and his wife, who drove about an hour to meet up with us and hug our necks. It was lovely to chat with them both!

I sped ate some street tacos while meeting another Relative, this one has a medical condition where she cannot physically touch electronic devices, cousin #7 of today.

Then a 2 hour focus group discussing what we thought about the new “AI Research Assistant”. Very insightful and thoughtful and wonderful to work with an entire set of dedicated genealogy programmers. If you want to check it out, its available in the FamilySearch Labs for everyone right now, but expect to see some really amazing advancements soon…

My last session of the day was Beyond the Basics and talked about using manuscripts. Quite funny how my classes today seemed to focus more on Archives than research. I think that must be preparing me for my next project, or perhaps the next 5 projects. Coming soon to a Substack near you…

Then I got to adventure to Walmart for a second suitcase - did I mention that I was given a BUNCH of gifts from FamilySearch for being part of the ARC, one of which were genealogy books!! Yes, donated duplicates from the FS library… For those of you who don’t know, libraries sometimes swap books if we have extra copies, and these are usually out of print, small number of printings or of local interest. One of ours was a Texas county history book. Thankfully, the trip to Walmart was not much of an adventure, and I still had plenty of time for some research at the library.

What I found was that my two besties had pulled A BUNCH of books that I needed, did index lookups, marked pages needed to be scanned and then went ahead and scanned them for me.

One was a very rare Ship Brooklyn book that I was able to speed scan and that was worth the entire trip right now. 265 pages, took me about 30 minutes to complete. We wrapped that up and doordashed chickfilet for dinner to celebrate a wonderful week.

Yes, there were things we missed or forgot to do, but all in all, we discovered that we could all do genealogy. In fact, I’ll probably spend tomorrow and Monday summarizing the classes, and reaching out once again to Relatives.

Thank you all for reading and coming along for the ride. Its been fun, but “This is Where the Cowboy Rides Away” fade to black…

Another amazing RootsTech conference is in the books.