SOME THINGS I LEARNED AT ROOTSTECH 2013Salt Palace, Salt Lake City, Utah, 21-23 Mar 2013
by Donald R. Snow
These notes are online at http://uvtagg.org/classes/
1. ROOTSTECH 2013
There were nearly 10,000 people that attended RootsTech 2013 in the Salt Palace, including many Family History Consultants and 1500 youth who attended a series of free classes on Saturday. It was the largest of the three RootsTech conferences so far and this one had lots of information geared to all levels of family history and not just for the highly technological, though there was plenty for them too. The keynote presentations are posted online at http://rootstech.org/ and are really worth watching. They are entertaining, as well as informative. The videos from RootsTech 2012 last year are also posted on the RootsTech website by clicking on About (on the left-hand side of the screen).
2. ROOTSTECH 2013 CLASS NOTES
The notes for all of the classes were posted 2 or 3 months before the conference for anyone to read, whether registered for the conference or not, and are still available. To download any that you want, just go to the RootsTech web page, click on Schedule, and then click on the title of any of the 150 classes that had notes. You will see two links, one for the notes in doc format and one for them in pdf format. You can do searches for any term in any of the notes by using Google site searches. For example, to find every occurrence of the term Evernote in all of the class notes do a Google search for "site:http://rootstech.org/
3. ROOTSTECH VIEWED REMOTELY AROUND THE WORLD
This year RootsTech was viewed remotely in at least 17 locations around the world. Here's the list. Notice that nearly half of these are outside the U.S.
IN THE U.S. OUT OF THE U.S.
Ashburn Virginia Stake Bogota Colombia Stake
Beaverton Oregon West Stake Calgary Alberta West Stake
Kansas City Stake Guatemala City Central Stake
Klein Texas Stake Lima Peru La Molina Stake
Liberty Missouri Stake Makati Philippines Stake
Los Angeles California Stake Mexico City Aragon Stake
Orlando Florida South Stake Nottingham England Stake
Powder Springs Georgia Stake Sao Paulo Brazil Stake
Rio Rancho New Mexico Stake
These stakes could arrange their own Family History "fair" and use the streaming videos and programs from RootsTech in Salt Lake City. The Family History Dept is evaluating how this went for possible expansion to 600 stakes next year.
4. ARTICLES AND BLOGS ABOUT ROOTSTECH 2013
The Church News ran several-page articles about the conference on 31 Mar (5 pages) and 7 Apr 2013 (2 pages), and there were articles in many other papers. Here are a few links.
http://www.ldschurchnews.com/
http://www.lds.org/church/
There were several "official bloggers" for the conference and many unofficial ones who reported it.
http://rootstech.org/bloggers
This is only a smattering of the 20-30 official blogs about the conference and there are just lots and lots of good reviews, comments, photos, interviews, and stories posted in these and many others.
5. EMPHASIS ON STORIES
The emphasis at this RootsTech was on stories and "current" family history, not just the genealogy of the individuals, and there were many sponsors and sections devoted to this. There were discussion of how to get others involved in FH, especially youth, and what we should be doing to be sure our own family history is preserved for later generations. There were many vendor booths relating to various aspects of stories and recording and presenting them and on Thursday evening the Mormon Tabernacle Choir put on a concert for the attendees of the history of Irving Berlin, a Jewish immigrant to the U.S. who wrote God Bless America. Information about the concert is at http://www.lds.org/church/
6. THE FAMILY HISTORY LIBRARY BOOK SCANNING PROJECT
One thing I learned at RootsTech 2013 was the process of the Family History Library's book scanning project. I made an appointment in advance of RootsTech to have them scan two books of Snow biographies. One was the Erastus Snow biography and the other was the Erastus Beman Snow biography, his son and my grandfather. The Snow family commissioned Andrew Karl Larson, History Professor at Dixie State College (now Dixie State University!) to write them many years ago and the family has the copyrights. The FH Library staff checked their system and found that they have a copy of the Erastus Snow biography on their shelves, but not the Erastus Beman Snow biography. Since the Snow family hadn't given them permission, they couldn't post a scan of the Erastus Snow biography online. I had talked to other members of the Snow family and we had decided that since both books had been published many years ago and were now out of print that we should give the FH Library permission to scan and post them online, so I signed the copyright release forms. The books were about 800 pages and 150 pages, respectively. They scanned them at the booth in the vendors area of RootsTech that day and gave them back to me that evening. They also gave me 4 2-gig flash drives with all 950 scanned pages in tiff format and said that when they get them posted online in 2 or 3 weeks that they will be in searchable pdf format. The Snow family is pleased that both of these books will be available online since they are not in print now and many family members would like copies. Now they can get pdf copies and they will be every-word searchable. When they are posted online, to find them just click on the Books button on FamilySearch, or go to that page directly at http://books.familysearch.
My daughter, Linda Snow Westover, and I gave a presentation on about using Picasa and other freeware to organize your digital photo collection. It turned out to be very popular and there were about 450 attendees in the class and many more that couldn't get in. I guess part of the interest is that everyone has loads of photos and they are looking for ways to organize and show them. Besides the 4-page syllabus notes of our class we made a one-page summary handout so people would have something in hand during the class. The notes are available on the RootsTech website (information in paragraph 1 above) and also, along with the one-page summary, are available on my Class Notes web page at http://uvtagg.org/
8. TALK ON ERASTUS SNOW BY ELDER STEVEN E. SNOW, LDS CHURCH HISTORIAN
I learned from the Church History Library booth at RootsTech that Elder Steve Snow's talk that he gave on 14 Feb 2013 in the Assembly Hall on Temple Square about his and my ancestor Erastus Snow will be posted online. Elder Snow is the LDS Church Historian. The CHL staff told me that 2 or 3 weeks after the 6-7 April General Conference, when they can get to it, his talk will be posted online. Since that talk was in a series of talks about historical Church members, I imagine that other talks will be posted there too. I forgot to ask them which website they would be posted on, but it will probably be their website http://churchhistorylibrary.
9. MYHERITAGE
James Tanner, author of Genealogy's Star blog at http://genealogysstar.
10. NEW VENDORS AND TOOLS
There were many new vendor companies this year and I hadn't even heard the names of some of them before. For example, PhotoFaceMatch at htt
10. BILLION GRAVES AND FIND A GRAVE
Geoff Rasmussen pointed out some differences between Billion Graves and Find A Grave, for example, how much easier it is to put cemetery data on Billion Graves than on FindAGrave, since you use Billion Graves' smart phone app and just take the picture. It is sent automatically to their file and is posted on their website so someone can transcribe it as soon as they can get to it. For Find A Grave you have to upload the photo. But the Find A Grave database has many times more graves than Billion Graves and you own the copyright to the photo, whereas Billion Graves owns the copyright to anything scanned with their app. Geoff mentioned an idea for when there is no headstone for the person in the cemetery, but you are sure they are buried there. He suggested that you write their information on a piece of paper, lay it on the ground, and photograph it with your Billion Graves smart phone app so it will have the correct GPS coordinates included. The Billion Graves app is free for smart phones and can be used in any cemetery by just snapping the picture. You don't need to do the entire cemetery, unless you have time and want to, and that makes a good youth project, e.g. an Eagle Scout project. He said his kids enjoy going to cemeteries and walking around and snapping pictures of the tombstones with their smart phones.
12. ANDROID APPS FOR GENEALOGY
I attended a class on Android genealogy apps taught by David Lifferth. The video of his presentation on this topic from RootsTech 2012 is online at https://familysearch.org/
13. USING EVERNOTE TO TAKE NOTES ON MY ANDROID TABLET
At this conference I experimented with taking notes using Evernote on my Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 tablet. I typed them in using a stylus with the virtual keyboard and found that it was slow, but I could get most of what I wanted to write. Using Evernote the notes are sync'd on my desktop and laptop computers at home, so I can edit them more easily there. I found it worked fine, but that I've got things to learn about Evernote on Android and how to use it. I also need to learn how to use a virtual keyboard faster. (I'm writing these notes on my desktop computer in Evernote so they are sync'd on my laptop and on my tablet.)
13. WORLDCAT FROM OCLC (ONLINE
WorldCat from OCLC -- http://
14. ROOTSTECH 2014
The dates for RootsTech 2014 were announced as 6-8 Feb 2014 in the Salt Palace, but in a new location in it. Hopefully, it will be in a part where there are some larger rooms and where it is easier to get from floor-to-floor with more elevators and/or escalators. Slow and crowded elevators have been major problems in each of the RootsTech conferences so far. But the planners are aware of it and may be able to do something about it for next year. I recommend you watch for details and check on it for RootsTech 2014. It is not just a conference for avid family historians, but includes lots for people at all levels of expertise.
These are only a few of the many things I learned at RootsTech. Since the notes are available to everyone, we can all learn more of topics that interest us, even if we didn't attend that class. I like having the notes available to everyone, both before and after the conference, and think that this made the conference much more valuable worldwide. I appreciate all the work and money that went into this conference and I hope you've caught some of the excitement I felt for RootsTech 2013.
Don Snow
