RootsTech 2019 - Tuesday - 26 February

Do you know what RootsTech is? Have you attended a RootsTech Conference in the past? RootsTech is the largest genealogy conference in the world, held in Salt Lake City, the mecca for genealogy. They are expecting over 14,000 people per day to attend. The conference runs for four days, from Wednesday, February 27 until Saturday, March 2 and today was the day of preparations for many of us.

View flying over the Rocky Mountains

So, what was today like? Well, for me it consisted of flying from Orlando to Salt Lake City. I left my home at 4am, boarded my flight in Orlando and spent the next 4 1/2 hours in the air. The flight was great, there was almost no turbulence, and we even arrived 25 minutes early.

Once I arrived, I boarded the UTA Trax which is a train line that runs throughout the city and to adjacent communities. This is one of the best metro lines I have used. It was less than a 10 minute ride from the airport right to my hotel.

After checking into the Plaza Hotel, I went across the road to the Salt Palace, where the conference will be held. They had early registration this year and it was seamless for me. I already had my name card which was sent to me earlier so all I had to do was pick up my bag, lanyard and speaker badge.

After registering, I decided to check out the room that I will be speaking at this year. My presentation is in room 155E at 3:00 on Saturday. That happens to be the last presentation session of the conference. I was surprised at the size of the rooms this year. They seem to be quite a bit larger than in previous years.

Room 155E where I will be speaking.

I walked around the Salt Palace for at least a half hour reacquainting myself with the layout and quickest route between classes. You need to know the layout so you can get to your preferred class. If you get lost you might miss out on that one class you really wanted to take.

One of the things many of us do at RootsTech is network. I had a meet-up planned for lunch for some of the members of the Second Life Genealogical Society. I am the current President of the organization and this is the only chance we get to bring us together and talk about our research. It was great getting back with some of them and meeting some for the first time in real life.

Julianne Trotter (FamilySearch) and me discussing indexing.

I also had an opportunity to meet up with Julianne Trotter from FamilySearch. She was one of the leads for the Zoning project that ran for awhile during 2017-2018. Zoning was a process where indexers selected newspaper articles related to birth, marriage and death events so they could be indexed later. We discussed where the project is now and also how to increase public interest in indexing more records. I mentioned one of the projects that I have been doing for several months which I call Genealogy on the Street. Each month I have been attending a local street market and setting up a genealogy booth where we do genealogy research for random people who come around. This has been a great success and has brought many new people into our Family History Center. I think we had a good discussion and it has made me think more seriously about some of the outreach plans I have been considering for the last couple years.

Now it is time to begin to relax, get things ready for tomorrow, and make sure I know which classes I want to attend. There will be a lot to do over the next couple days and I hope to be able to provide my readers with some insight on this conference and some helpful tips for their research.