RootsTech 2022 Preview

RootsTech 2022 is just over a month away and many of us are looking forward to overloading on the genealogy related speakers and events on March 3-5. The theme for the RootsTech conference this year is "Choose Connections". If you attended RootsTech 2021, you know that there were over 1 million people attending the virtual event and we were able to connect to our cousins using the app. Additionally, there were over 1,000 presentations which are still available for you learn from. 

As of earlier this week, there were over 90,000 people already registered for the virtual event and we have over 1,500 presentations being prepared for the conference. There will also be live panel discussions, keynote speakers, the expo hall where you can meet with various vendors and watch demonstrations of their products, and so much more. FamilySearch has been working all year to improve the experience over last year.

So, what can you expect? Several of the keynote speakers have already been announced. Since this is an international conference, many of the keynote speakers will not be as familiar to viewers in the United States. 

• On January 5th, Apollonia Poilâne was announced as a keynote speaker. Apollonia is a world renownd bread baker and author from Paris.
• On January 12th, Matthew Modine was announced as a keynote speaker. Matthew is an award-winning actor and activist. He has starred in Stranger Things, Full Metal Jacket, Jobs, and Birdy.
• On January 19th, Diego Torres was announced as a keynote speaker. Diego is an award-winning singer, songwriter, producer, musician, and actor from Argentina.  

So, what am I up to at RootsTech 2022? Quite a lot! On Saturday, March 5 from 2:00-3:00pm Eastern Time, I will be participating in a live panel discussion talking about how you can work on family history projects as a community. My portion of the discussion will focus on collecting and connecting WWII newspaper stories. The other panelists will discuss their experience with projects including the BYU Record Linking Labs Projects (Dr. Joe Price), The Bridge Forum Let's Do Good Together (Heather Jacobs), Historical Newspaper Indexing Project (Taneya Koonce), The Ogden Stockyards Project (Rachel Trotter), 21 Day Family Connections Experiment (Taralyn Parker), Connected Tempe Community Ancestry Project (Mckell Keeney), and the Tacoma - Pierce Records Project (Mary Anderson and Alisha Chang). As you can see, there are a lot of projects that will be discussed during this panel discussion. The discussion will be simulcast on Zoom and YouTube and we hope to have a chance to answer some of your questions.

I will also be presenting three recorded sessions. The sessions will be on how to research in the online archives for French, German, and Dutch records. Each session will have a detailed handout with links to the various archives and collections available in each archive. This will be a great resource for anyone who has links to these countries.

And finally (I think), I will also be participating in the Expo Hall representing The Family History Guide. The mission of The Family History Guide is to greatly increase the number of people actively involved in family history worldwide, and to make everyone's family history journey easier, more efficient, and more enjoyable. The Family History Guide is a great resource to learn or teach family history methodology and resources from. I invite you to take a look and explore the Guide to see what you might be missing in your research.

I hope you will take advantage of this opportunity and register for the FREE RootsTech 2022 conference. I know that I am taking time off from work in order to fully immerse myself in all of the resources that will be available from March 3-5. But many of the resources will be available afterwards for those who can't join us in person. Hope to see you there!