Salt Lake City, Utah
Sunny Morton, Genealogy Book Lovers Group Moderator and Genealogy Gems Contributing Editor
Lisa is all over RootsTech this year, teaching and running demos and–her favorite part–meeting many of YOU! So she’s asked me, Gems editor Sunny Morton, to send out a RootsTech Report for those of you who aren’t here.
In case you’re not familiar with this one-of-a-kind (and still evolving) conference, RootsTech is part traditional conference, part trade show. Top speakers teach technology-infused topics in packed classrooms. Industry leaders wow on the big stage, amplified by enormous monitors and sound systems.
Host FamilySearch International has pulled out all the stops to make the event bigger and better than last year: there are more attendees, more exhibitor s
pace, more entertainment. A reported 6700 attendees preregistered, with an additional 2000 youth expected on Saturday and an estimated 5000 additional viewers tuning in to selected sessions at 16 satellite locations in 7 countries. With buy anxiety medication hopes to extend remote viewership in-language to ten times that number of locations next year, RootsTech is positioning itself as the world’s biggest and furthest-reaching genealogical conference.
Behind all the glamor, industry buzz, excitement of new services and products and everyday genealogists is a message FamilySearch is broadcasting to all who will listen: they want to recruit legions of new family historians who will preserve the stories of millions of lives. Though FamilySearch will continue to provide us millions of sources for dates-names-places, its new online family tree service is designed to capture stories, too, because that’s what makes genealogy meaningful to most of us.
We’ll tell you more about that–and other fun RootsTech updates–in upcoming posts. Meanwhile, tune in here wherever you are to join the fray: catch live streaming sessions and see what’s happening for yourself.
