What I got out of Rootstech

First the free stuff - badges, blogger beads and more.

This is just a selection of the goodies I acquired during Rootstech 2013, to add to a fair old existing collection - you can hear me coming, even if I'm not talking (it can happen!) with the clanking of the beads and badges I have accumulated over the last few years.

The blogger beads attract quite a bit of attention, and it has become a custom for members of the Geneabloggers community to get a new set of beads, courtesy of blogging royalty Thomas MacEntee and Dear Myrtle. The Rootstech 2013 beads were from Dear Myrtle, and they are the tasteful black and silver/grey ones with a 'Dear Myrtle' luggage tag. The sparkly pink, purple and silver ones are not strictly blogger beads, they were the required adornments for guests at Thomas's birthday party on Friday night (great party, Thomas!).

Badges can be more functional, especially the conference ID badge, marked with the events you had pre-booked. As it turned out, the events on the badges bore little relation to the sessions actually booked, but it didn't matter at all because the Rootstech door stewards had paper lists. I got badges from My Heritage, 'I Tweet' from the Society of Genealogists and another British badge from The Rude Genealogist - follow that link at your own risk! I also got a rather attractive enamelled pin for doing some FamilySearch indexing which is edging ever closer to the 1 billion mark.

The magic target wasn't quite reached during Rootstech, but it should be any time now... I have done quite a bit of indexing before, intermittently, and it's quite good fun. Well, it usually is - I consider myself a fairly experienced interpreter and transcriber, but the batch I did in public in the Expo Hall had the worst handwriting I have seen in a very long time (New Zealand passenger lists, since you ask). Ireally earned that badge!

Conference attendees can usually pick up a selection of adhesive ribbons to stick to the bottom of their  ID badges, and I was quite restrained this time, I just got Ancestry and Findmypast membership ribbons, plus 'I love British Newspapers' and 'I flip over Flip-Pal'. This year's complimentary lanyard was from Mocavo. I was also one of the lucky recipients of a voucher worth a 6-month subscription to My Heritage, a site that I have to confess I don't know very well, so I look forward to giving it a good try-out. And of course I can always find a use for a ScotlandsPeople voucher! Not a bad haul, I think.

What I didn't get...

Josh Taylor says 'sorry' and I forgive him!

The demand for Findmypast's 'Kiss me, my ancestors were...' badges greatly outstripped supply, and by the time I got anywhere near the stand they were long gone. But we have been promised further supplies at future events - put me down for Scottish and Irish, please.

Enough of the freebies, maybe next time I'll write something more serious and thoughtful.