RootsTech 2024 – Day 2

I started the day with an 8:00 session on Adding Social History to Your Family History.

Genealogy is More than who, what were. it’s the why and the how.

Miles Meyer RootsTech presentation, March 1, 2024.

This is what appeals to me about genealogy. While I’m sometimes jealous of those who have thousands of names on their tree, I’m more interested in learning about WHO the people were. After all, I did name my blog “Who We Are and How We Got This Way.” I’m more like my obstinate great grandfather Sigmund LICHTENTHAL than I care to admit!!

I like to say the stories put the leaves on the branches. I already knew the importance of adding of social history to our research, so I was interested to learn what the presenter would share. I was pleased to hear him caution people not to fictionalize what they’ve learned about the times in which their ancestor lived. This is something I struggle with when writing my stories. You don’t want to bore your readers with just the dry facts, but you want to be sure you aren’t misleading them.

While I already use newspaper articles in writing my stories, I never paid a lot of attention to the advertisements. Miles suggested we look at advertisements to bring more context to our ancestors’ lives.

A few sources you might not have thought to look include:

• County histories, which can be found on Google Books, Hathi Trust, and FamilySearch books.
• Using the FamilySearch wiki to research a certain county. The wiki can tell you when records started or maybe lost in fire.
• Google scholar where you may find your ancestor mentioned in some obscure scholarly journal.

Session Two: Finding the Hidden Woman in Your Family Tree – Barbara Vine Little

I chose this session because I’m still trying to find information about Scott’s great-grandmother. Also, finding records on women can be difficult because once married, they basically lost all their independent rights. Thankfully,, in the mid-1880s the Married Woman s Property Bill was finally passed and that’s not the case anymore!

I learned some new terms used to refer to women in the colonial period:

• Feme sole never married or widowed
• Feme covert married

Also, apparently an “infant” is any person under 21. That was a new one for me! Barbara had an extensive presentation and shared several tips to locate women. I will have to check out her handout as she only got through about 57 of the 98 slides she planned to share.

Following that session I headed to the Expo Hall to meet Cheryl for lunch. My falafel wrap was pretty good! We had a nice long break to explore the Expo hall because we decided to skip today’s keynote speaker. I made sure to stop at the IAJGS table for a chat (International Association of Jewish Genealogy Societies.) It turns out some people had stopped by earlier and asked if there were any Jewish genealogy societies in Connecticut. The IAJGS didn’t have literature on our society, so I gave them a bunch of business cards. Win-win! People will have contact info if they want to join our society and I get out the word about my book!!

We did enjoy some photo-ops at the Storied booth. Cheryl recreated the photo of her 95-year-old blind aunt on a motorcycle!!

We walked around a bit more and took pics of ourselves in this weird triangle thing that makes it look like you are in a kaleidoscope. Cheryl still has a headache.

We needed to use the facilities by that point, so we asked one of the (what seems to be…) thousands of RootsTech helpers for the closest one. He directed us to walk straight down the hall and go into the hotel lobby. What hotel? The only hotel we knew that was next door to the Salt Palace was ours, the Radisson. Guess a lot can happen when you haven’t been to a city in four years. Last year, a beautiful Hyatt Hotel opened. Who knew???

What a beautiful hotel. There is a 24-hour market and a restaurant. We inquired about room rates, thinking maybe we will stay there from now on. The front-desk clerk was quite cagey, saying rates vary from day to day. I pressed her for a ballpark figure and she finally said, “Somewhere between $200-$300.” We will continue to stay at the Radisson! (UPDATE: we found out it would be $500 to stay there in March 2025.)

Session Three: What’s New and Exciting at MyHeritage with Gilad Japhet, Founder and CEO

The room was packed to hear what MyHeritage was working on. They made a big announcement today! I was surprised to learn that the founder, Gilad Japhet, started doing genealogy when he was only 13 years old. He also was the person who invented the sun chart, a more compact way to display a family tree. I could write an entire blog post on everything Gilad shared about MyHeritage, but I will just focus on today’s big announcement.

Today, March 1, 2024, MyHeritage launched a new website, Oldnews.com. This website is a new subscription service offering newspapers from more than 100 countries. You can search for papers by place or publication name. Once an article is selected, the search terms will be highlighted on the page. The image will be available for download as well as the full transcription. It works seamlessly with your MH account and looks to be very promising.

Session Four: I needed a break

I couldn’t decide whether to attend a session on RootsMagic, the genealogy program I use, or one on Steerage Passengers. So, instead, I decided to charge my phone and blog a bit.

Session Five: Storytelling Techniques to Improve Your Family Narrative – Laura Hedgecock

I met Laura at the Geneabloggers photo meetup. As a fellow writer, I was very interested in learning what she would share. Right off the bat, she had my attention. First of all, she suggested to the prospective writers in the audience that “narrative nonfiction ” was the genre to emulate. Those are my people! Not everyone uses that term, so I felt a kindred spirit here. Plus, her images, which were mostly AI generated, were FANTASTIC!

The more we explore the past, the better we can convey it to others

Laura Hedgecock, RootsTech presentation, March 1, 2024

I really liked what she said about the pitfalls of over-describing in our writing. When we do that, we are actually cheating the reader of the experience of forming an image in their own minds.

I was amazed at how much information Laura was able to pack into one hour. In just sixty minutes, she touched on just about every aspect of writing, including how to deal with the difficult chapters in our family story. “We don’t own our ancestors’ baggage.” Well said. ( I’m tempted to make an AI image from that idea!)

That session ended at 5:30, so I headed back to the Hyatt. Cheryl and I decided to have dinner there after we saw how nice it was! We ended up having a dinner companion—an elderly man named Kip. When Cheryl passed by him as he was waiting for a table in the restaurant, he recognized her from the Expo Hall. She is hard to forget with all the ribbons attached to the bottom of her badge.

They started talking about using ChatGPT and, of course, Cheryl said, “Oh, you should talk to my friend!” When we realized he was planning on eating alone, we invited him to join us. What a surprise to find out he was a former professor at BYU (Brigham Young University) and had actually written many books, one of which was a book on finding genealogy sources in Connecticut.

After finishing our delicious plates of Rigatoni Bolognese and sharing a beautiful salad, we took our doggy bags and headed back to the Radisson to rest up for the final day of the conference.

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