Salt Lake City - getting ready for Rootstech

Conference attendees have been arriving over the last few days for what promises to be one of the largest genealogical gatherings ever. There will be more than 2000 people at Rootstech. The site now has a link to the sessions that will be streamed live online including each day's keynote sessions. The live Twitter feed is also running on the home page, which you can also follow with the hashtag #Rootstech.

For the whole of Wednesday the place was abuzz with pre-conference gatherings, formal and informal. Genealogists were catching up with old friends, meeting new ones, and putting faces and voices to Facebook and Twitter friends they had never met in person. Most of these encounters involved TOO MUCH FOOD. I was surprised and pleased to find that my room reservation included vouchers for the breakfast buffet. Ghent put me at a table right nest to Tom Champoux from NEHGS, a great start to the day. I went to the Family History Library where I was supposed to recording a tutorial for the FamilySearch website, but I got a reprieve, the recordings will be on Monday. I checked in with the British Isles floor, just to reassure them that I had arrived and was ready to do my talk on The National Archives website in the afternoon. Then it was time for lunch with my friends Pat and Gordon Erickson, better known as Dear Myrtle and 'Mr Myrt', and others, including Amy Coffin of The We Tree Genealogy Blog They are both Rootstech Official Bloggers.

I gave my talk to a large and appreciative audience, including many FamilySearch staff members, mainly from the British Isles floor - some familiar faces there. This was nothing to do with Rootstech, it's just that having heavily used FamilySearch resources free of charge for over 20 years, whenever I am in Salt Lake city I like to give something back. I got a little bit of research done in the Library, but spent more time helping out other people! In no time at all it was time for dinner, which I don't have time to do justice to right now, except to thank Bill Forsyth and ProQuest for their generous hospitality.

Registration has opened, so I need to go and check then, then head to the Nauvoo for the wiki contributors' breakfast meeting.