I’ve been attending conferences for over 30 years, and this morning was the first time I’ve ever had the opportunity to attend an opening session. In past years I’ve always been in an exhibit booth getting ready to sell books. This year I came to RootsTech as an attendee, and got to be on the other side of the table…
The day started early with a breakfast sponsored by FindMyPast.com. It was great getting to sit with my friends, have a delightful breakfast, and then get all the latest dope on what was happening at FindMyPast. This British-based company (with a Dutch CEO) is making great advances in the American market. They started off here several years ago at what I considered an distinct disadvantage, but quickly overcame it, making them a major player. I’ll write more about that later.
The opening session was really quite amazing. All very high-tech, with speakers that left us motivated to get on with a terrific RootsTech. It was announced that 21,927 people were registered for the event (at that moment) – coming from 35 countries, with about 200,000 additional people expected to live-stream worldwide.
Genealogy Roadshow genealogists Kenyatta D. Berry, Joshua Taylor (FGS President) and Mary Tedesco came on stage and brought us up-to-date on the War of 1812 Preserve the Pensions digitization project. The documents being scanned have never been microfilmed, but are now being digitized and made available for FREE on Footnote.com. Thus far, half the money needed to do the entire project of digitizing 7.2 million pages has been raised – that’s 1.6 million dollars raised, and that much more needed to finish. However, with corporate matching funds we only have to come up with half of that. This is an exciting project, as these records are the most-used of any of the original documents found at the National Archives.
Dennis Brimhall, the FamilySearch International CEO, brought us up-to-date on the latest work that FamilySearch is doing. He reported that there are now 1.1 billion names in FamilyTree. 100,000,000 names found in obituaries at GenealogyBank have now been indexed and made available at the website. Working with FamilySearch data that was obtained decades ago, Ancestry.com is currently indexing 80,000,000 Mexican vital records – planning to make them available by year’s end! Dennis spent some time talking about how excited he was about the new Discovery Center at the Joseph Smith Memorial Building (with elements of it in the exhibit hall). I will write more about that later. It’s amazing…
Mike Mallin, the chief production officer for MyHeritage.com came onstage and gave a fascinating presention of what MyHeritage is doing. This company, based in Tel Aviv, Isreal, is making huge strides in worldwide family trees, making a “fun” experience for even the novice genealogist.
Tan Lee, a technology innovator and the founder of Emotiv, then came onstage and told her story – of the loss of family members in Vietnam, escape from the communists in a boat disguised as a fishing vessel, pirates, settling in Australia, overcoming hardship, education, awards, and family… An amazing story. We gave her a standing ovation.
