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Friday, February 3, 2012

The Journey to RootsTech 2012

Day 2 - 2February 2012

The day started off with an excellent breakfast at eh Radisson. The other good news was that I didn't have to change rooms. I headed over to hear the RootsTech keynote speaker for the morning, Jay Verkler, the past head of Family Search. I was very impressed and excited with what he told us. There are great collaboration plans in the near future. He also talked about developing the community framework timeline. That opens up some excellent research possibilities. Another momentous announcement was that they now estimate that it will only take ten years to digitize the current microfilm holdings for the Family History Library. I can can hardly wait! And it's wonderful to hear there are 4,200 genealogists here. That rocks. Google had an intriguing announcement about Google Chrome. Using Historical-Data.org, Schema.org, and an extension they will now be able to deeper search sites that were ignored in earlier Google searches. Family Search, Ancestry, and others will be included. BrightSolid is evidently going to become part of the American genealogist's vocabulary. They are a UK company that is well-known there that is coming across the pond. That could open up some interesting competition.

After the keynote thousands of genealogists headed to the Exhibitors Hall. I was aiming to get a free tee shirt by getting my card stamped from various vendors. I succeeded and am now the proud owner of a RootsTech tee. It was rather crowded to actually visit with vendors, but I decided to do more in-depth chats with them later.

My first session was Steve Morse. He has some great free helps that I would call widgets but probably aren't. They help you find things like the birth date from a gravestone that gives the death date and the age in year, month, and day. He also has some great aides for the 1940 census! He's at SteveMorse.org, not com. More to come.

4 comments:

  1. I read about your blog on the new Geneabloggers list and as a former librarian/library director/library system director, I just wanted to say thank you for your helping save your local branch library. A toast to you!

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  2. Welcome to GeneaBloggers! Roots Tech sounds like such a great conference. I hope one day that I may be able to go myself and meet all the wonderful people there. I enjoyed listening to the GeneaBloggers radio show broadcast from there during the conference. It sounded like so much fun.

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  3. RootsTech was a great conference. I hope to make it there next year.
    Regards,
    Theresa (Tangled Trees)

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