RootsTech Connect

 After attending every RootsTech for the past 10 years, this year will be different!  Like every Conference in the past year, this one will be virtual.   While I'm happy so many new people from around the world will be able to participate, I will miss the crowds, comraderie, classes and vendors.  

And mostly, I will miss the opportunity to spend a few extra days in the Family History Library in Salt Lake City.  I have spent many a happy day and night trolling through microfilms, becoming lost in my family tree!

I've seen a preview of the RootsTech Connect platform, classes, key notes, etc and I think it will be great. I particularly like the idea that I can watch at my leisure, and dip into classes that I wouldn't have time to do if we were in person in Salt Lake City.  It's always a dilemma over which classes to go to, when there are multiple classes of interest at the same time.   

Things I won't miss:

    Queueing for a seat, queueing for a bathroom

    Enduring a room that is too cold, too hot, too stuffy, and too crowded

    Struggling to hear a presenter and enduring technical glitches

    Racing from one end of the Salt Palace to the other through huge slow moving crowds

    The cold Salt Lake City weather

Things I will miss:

    Meeting cousins and friends

    The Expo Hall and ability to chat with the experts

    The Family History Library

    The buzz of being around thousands of people who share my passion

    The complete immersion for days on end, totally focused on genealogy

    

I look forward to blogging about the positives/negatives of a virtual RootsTech after it's over. I have confidence that FamilySearch will do a great job of pulling it off -- and I hope that in the future we can have a hybrid model, with both in person and virtual options!

Pandemic Research!!!

 As the pandemic drones on and on, I've finally gotten my research groove back.  A year ago at the beginning of the pandemic, I couldn't focus and realized I was just trying to distract myself with research, and wasn't making any great headway due to my distraction.

Now, a year on -- I've reignited my research genes, and made some great discoveries.  I've gone back to some of my original research that I did via microfilm, before the internet even existed (sounds like the dark ages!).   New records have come online, and so I've added those and corrected some of my original suppositions with facts and records.

I've greatly expanded some of my Cornish lines -- particularly a branch that went to New Zealand and another to Montana.  I found ancestors on my Oats line via a DNA match names Atkinson, who's ancestor had married Elizabeth Sara Oats.  I had her in my tree, but she had "disappeared" -- and reappeared in New Zealand, where she and a brother emigrated.

The Montana connection is through my Davey line.  They emigrated to work in the mines, and then became ranchers.

I haven't spent that much time on my Irish side, but recently cleaned up some confusing NEE families. I had two Colman/Coleman John Nee's born the same year or so - one came to the USA (Pittsburgh) and one I'm not sure on.   Multiple online family trees have these 2 men mixed up, so trying to sort out through  original baptism/marriage records has been a challenge.

Ancestry's DNA hits, and Thru Lines have helped tremendously in unearthing some small matches that helped solidify research presumptions, and proved the connections. Sometimes just one connection this way has led to hundreds of new cousins. 

Coming back to this blog reminds me I need to document all these "new" findings, so that I can recall how I got there.  Reading back through my old blog entries reignites my interest in discoveries and documentation.  I like to set out my original assumption, why I thought this and then the records that helped to corroborate my idea or disproved my theory.