Tag Archives: #RootsTechConnect

#RootstechConnect Ramblings Part 3

by thehistoryinterpreter

This will be my final #RootstechConnect report. I have more sessions to watch on my playlist and I will mention any that stand out but this is the last dedicated post. Many congratulations to the organisers. I hope it will be repeated.

 It is strange how so many of us are binge watching RootstechConnect talks, when we could just watch one a week for the next year. Maybe it is in a subconscious attempt to replicate the hectic face-to-face experience. Despite being lured into the garden by the glorious weather, I have made inroads into my playlist over the last two days.

Having recorded details of all my Relatives at Rootstech on a word document I realised that it would have been a lot more useful if I’d gone for a spreadsheet, so I could sort by common ancestors and so on. That took a bit of time. Now I have my list I need to do something with it and actually contact a few of these people.

For the final official day, I tried the two part Tracing your ancestors in the 1700s using DNA with Dr Tim Janzen. Sadly, his approach assumes that you have far more close relatives than I have and also makes use of GEDmatch, which I don’t use. When he said ‘I tested my mother’s sixteen first cousins’, I realised that his methodology wasn’t going to be much help to me!

Bringing your Genealogical Society into the C21st with Andrew Lee, was next, there were three parts this one. Suffice it to say that most of the societies I am involved with are considerably further into the C21st than those he was describing. It began with ‘get an email address for your society’. To be fair, it came from a US perspective and seemed to be addressed to small groups of 30-100 members. I really hope that less enlightened groups take his advice on various topics.

The great thing about virtual Rootstech is that, if you find a presentation isn’t relevant to you, you don’t have to regret sampling it, as you haven’t missed out on another session in order to attend.

Then it was time to check out every booth in turn and see if any of the downloadable resources were of use. I spent most of the time at the Family Tree Maker booth and was interested to see their resources for societies. I succumbed to the latest version but still have to grasp the nettle and try it out. I do miss the supply of free pencils and sweets that would come with a trawl of the various stands at an in-person conference!

Back to the ever-increasing playlist to listen to Discovering Records of the Enslaved a discussion between Sharon Batiste Gillins and Cheri Hudson Passey. A really thought-provoking session on how we share information about issues surrounding slavery, be we descended from enslaver or enslaved. I also watched her excellent follow up session Discovering Slaveholders in the Family Tree. These are definitely right up there on my best sessions list.

I looked at Community Reconstitution by Joe Price, thinking that it would be one for the one-place studiers. Personally, I prefer the term reconstruction but I wasn’t being picky. It was interesting to find that he viewed surname studies as a form of community reconstitution. The focus of the talk was not about community reconstitution at all, or at least not in my sense of the term but about adding more people to the Family Search tree. There was an emphasis on quantity over quality, advocating the use of five year olds to add new people and adding records whilst listening to audio books and exercising. That way madness lies.

Another session that I would recommend that you put on your must watch list is Girls must Feed Pigs by Darris G Williams. This is an interesting look at personal testimonies from various sources, such as Parliamentary enquiries, diaries and letters, that flesh out the evidence in the mainstream records. He recommended this from the family search wiki and similar pages for other countries. Ok so the list is shorter than the number of books on these topics that I own but it is a good start and we were invited to add to the content.  I just need several more lifetimes to do all this.

Encouraged by Twitter traffic, I then took a look at what #21dayfamilyconnectionsexperiment was all about, although I am not sure that I am any the wiser. Creative Storytelling Techniques borrowed from Photography from Laura Hedgecock was next, a novel idea and Laura’s photographs are stunning.

I learned about The Genealogist’s new Map Explorer feature. Something else to tempt me to take out a subscription, although I always told myself I’d wait for the rest of the Valuation Office Records to be added before adding to my subscription list. I did ask the question; it will be a while.

The final talk of my weekend was Shortcuts to Success: solving English genealogical conundrums with Else Churchill. Now to tackle those relatives at Rootstech. Only 20% are on my maternal side and 121 of the 269 descend from the same couple!

#RootstechConnect Ramblings Part 1

by thehistoryinterpreter

I have to congratulate the #RootstechConnect and Family Search Team for an impressive feat of organisation. The day began with a Zoom breakfast chat with the lovely folk from Family Tree Magazine (UK). It was great to see so many familiar faces. I was able to become part of the ‘What Family Historians Like for Breakfast’ poll.

I then started making my way through the playlist that I’d made from the 1500+ sessions on offer. This proved not to be as daunting as I’d thought, as some were less than two minutes long and none were more than twenty minutes. There doesn’t seem to be a way of knowing how long the session is until you open the video. I started with Why Family Search has a shared Family Tree with Brad Lowder, worth watching for the hilarious opening but I might dispute his reference to it as ‘the most accurate tree’.

I tried looking at Thru Lines and Genetic Clusters with Nicole Dyer, then watched Penny Walters’ more substantial Adoption sessions. Having had fun with Relatives at Rootstech, I tuned in to Mike Sandburg’s session, which was accompanied by rather a lot of background noise. I learned that you could filter the relatives by maternal and paternal lines. Only 20% of mine are on my mother’s side.

I then decided I’d better see what was on offer in the Expo Hall and maybe pick up some bargains. I was tempted to upgrade my Family Tree Maker at a seriously discounted price, although the person I ‘spoke’ to seemed to think it was a better idea for me to use the existing customer discount, which is substantially less than the show offer. I then tried to get a reduction for my soon to expire Ancestry account. Having got rid of the virtual assistant I got a real person who offered me 30% off but I would have to ‘ring this number’ as they couldn’t process payments on chat. I duly rang that number and spoke to a ‘customer solutions agent’. I was a bit surprised to find the person on the end of the phone had absolutely no idea what Rootstech was. She kept telling me that Rootsweb was different! ‘You know’, I said, ‘big virtual conference, half a million people.’ It appeared to fall on stony ground and I couldn’t get a discount as I had no record of the ‘conversation’ I’d had online, not much of a solution there then.

Some ‘proper’ sessions next. Maurice Gleeson on Y DNA for surname research, Sylvia Valentine’s Children in Care and Debbie Kennett’s Secrets and Surprises, followed by the briefer 10 Virtual Family History Activities to Connect with Family from Shenley Puterbaugh. I watched and enjoyed Sunetra Sarker’s live keynote session but I will give the other keynotes, none of whom I’ve heard of, a miss. I am afraid I just can’t get my head around using non-historians/family historians as keynotes, although that’s just me, other people love these sessions and find them inspiring.

I then had fun with My Heritage’s new Deep Nostalgia feature, which animates old photographs in a somewhat creepy fashion. This is another marmite thing and I have misgivings about tampering with the original evidence but this didn’t stop me giving it a go.

I finished the day with a brief visit to a virtual genie pub.

All in all, great fun. I hope you are joining the party. Now all set for day two. What will that bring?

Facts, Figures and Fiction: having fun with Relatives at #RootsTechConnect

by thehistoryinterpreter

Today came the excitement that we can see who our Relatives at Rootstech are. I now have 71. Not unexpectedly, 65% are living in the US, 16% in Canada, 10% in Australia and 9% in the UK.

The closest relation, who remained so about as long as my alleged relationship to Prince William lasted (see yesterday’s blog), was a third cousin. Some more tree surgery and now she is correctly labelled as a 5th cousin once removed. I have four of these and these are the closest Relatives at Rootstech. This is about par for the course given my dearth of cousins. Amongst the Relatives at Rootstech, I have six sixth cousins, fifteen sixth cousins once removed and seven sixth cousins twice removed. Then follow various seventh and eight cousins. The most remote relatives identified are nine nineth cousins, five of whom descend from the same couple.

What was most interesting, was which branches of my family were and were not, represented. I should say that, apart from one brick wall great great grandparent, my tree is fairly evenly populated, with many lines back to 4x or 5x great grandparents and beyond. I looked at my Rootstech relatives and which of my eight great grandparents they linked to. As expected, no one was connected to the brick wall ancestor. I have now added the people who I believe to be his parents and the ancestry beyond that, to see if that makes any difference. Much more surprisingly, two other great grandparents were not represented at all, although I suppose one was called Smith and others may not have had much success tracing them. Given the high levels of emigration from Devon and Cornwall, I was expecting many of my relatives to link to that quarter of my ancestry. What I wasn’t prepared for was quite how overwhelmingly this was the case. 72% of my Relatives at Rootstech come from this 25% of my ancestry. An overwhelming 38% of my Relatives at Rootstech come from just one line, although I must say that I believe the earliest generations of this tree to be speculative. I suspect that US descendants of this line became adherents of the LDS church, which might account for the high number of matches.

I began, as you do, by madly and randomly clicking on the various listed relatives. The I went through them methodically, making a note of all the names, so, if the number goes up, I can tell who is new. I have also listed the relationship, the common ancestors and where the relative lives. I then went through each one, to see if they featured on my list of DNA matches. Of course, I only picked this up if the user name was similar or recognisable. I thought I might identify the connection for some of those DNA matches with no Ancestry trees, or private trees. I was surprised and disappointed find just one Relative at Rootstech who was also a DNA match, and I had already identified her place on my tree.

Relatives at Rootstech by Great grandparent

If you want to join in the fun, there are three stages to the process. You need to make sure you have signed up for RootsTechConnect using the same email address that you use to log in to Family Search. You have to have some kind of tree at Family Search and you have to have opted in to Relatives at Rootstech. I would love to find out that I am related to someone I know.