Post RootsTech Adventures – Day 1

Here’s a fun video I haven’t posted before. Because we look and sound like idiots. We are trying to get the 360 degree selfie station to work. You can see a more successful attempt on my RootsTech Day 1 post.

I thought I’d sleep in after multiple days of rising early for 8:00 a.m sessions. Guess I’m broken now—got up at 7:45. For breakfast, Cheryl and I enjoyed the yoghurt parfaits we purchased at the fancy hotel’s market yesterday. On previous days, we had mini bagels and peanut butter Cheryl thoughtfully brought from home.

There is NOTHING to do in Salt Lake City on a Sunday. Like, really. NOTHING. But, we did discover the Natural History Museum of Utah was open today! We called for an Uber, which was a good idea, since it would have taken us 45 minutes to walk. The museum was really nice. The architecture was very modern and the views were wonderful. The museum is perched at the top of a steep hill and looks down over the city. Yup—the Uber was definitely the way to go!

After returning to the hotel, we had the second half of the chicken salad sandwiches leftover from yesterday. Cheryl headed out for walk and I settled on the bed to tackle my emails. Why the bed, you ask? Not only is there no dresser in this room, there is also no extra chair or table. If I want to use the desk, I would have to clear it of all the things we put there because THERE IS NO DRESSER! (Can you tell that’s bugging me?)

Chery retuned after an hour. She walked in the door just as I texted her “Are you alive?” We spent the afternoon on our respective beds, working on our computers. I signed up for a free 7-day trial of MyHeritage’s new product Oldnews.com. I already read Marian Burk Wood’s assessment of the service on her blog Climbing My Family Tree, and I must say I agree with her completely. The interface is very clean but really barebones. I would like the ability to search individual states instead of the entire USA. I also would like to see a list of the papers in the database. I did find a couple gems though, and I really like the full text transcript that you can copy and paste. Be aware, the OCR is not always great.

As the sun sets, we are waffling on the idea of going to the hot tub. It’s now 7:35. What do you think we will do? Tomorrow’s plan is to visit the Family History Library and hopefully find some answers to a bunch of questions. Wish us luck!