DON'S FREEWARE CORNER - FEB 2022
ROOTSTECH 2022 AND WHAT IT IS
©2022 Donald R. Snow
-- This page last updated 2022-02-07
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These Freeware Corner notes are published in TAGGology, our Utah
Valley Technology and Genealogy Group (UVTAGG) monthly
newsletter. They are also posted on my Freeware Corner
Notes page on http://uvtagg.org/classes/dons/dons-classes.html
where the links are active and there may be corrections, updates,
and additional information here and in other class notes.
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ROOTSTECH 2022 AND WHAT IT IS
©2022 Donald R. Snow
BRIEF HISTORY OF ROOTSTECH
RootsTech started in 2011 as a follow-on to the BYU (Brigham Young University) Genealogy
and Family History conferences. Those had been presented yearly for about 50 years and had become
very popular and attracted people from all over the world. They included technology as well as non-technology
research and family history. The first RootsTech
conferences were in-person and held in the Salt Palace
Convention Center in Salt Lake City. Each year the
number attending increased from about 3,000 in 2011 to 30,000 in 2019. Everyone had to many dollars for registration, hotels, and food while in Salt Lake City. The Church of Jesus Christ
of Latter-day Saints paid the largest part of the bills, assisted by many other genealogy businesses, since
the registration fees didn't cover all the expenses. In 2019 an additional RootsTech Conference was held in
London, England, and it attracted 10,000 people. Then the Covid pandemic
made it undesirable to have in-person conferences, so it was decided to have the entire RootsTech conference virtual, i.e. online only, in 2021 and that it would be completely free for everyone. That was a phenomenal success with more than 1 million people attending from more than 240 countries around the world. Since there are only about 250 countries in all, essentially the entire world was represented. There were 1500 classes
and keynotes and subtitles were available to watch any video in 30 or 40 different languages. It was a major success by any measure. Personally, I
have attended and spoken at nearly all of the RootsTech conferences. The in-person conferences in the Salt Palace were getting too large for my old body to
get around, so I was glad when hey went virtual, so I could still attend, but from home.
ARTICLES ABOUT ROOTSTECH
A Wikipedia article of the history of RootsTech is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RootsTech and a FamilySearch Wiki article is at https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Category:RootsTech . The Video Archive of past RootsTechs is at https://www.rootstech.org/video-archive?lang=eng .
ROOTStECH 2022
The dates are m 3-5 Mar 2022 and, again, it is entirely virtual
and completely free. Anyone can register at
https://rootstech.org .
Here is a screenshot of the webpage.
Screenshot of the RootsTech 2022 Webpage
Most of the keynotes and classes
have been recorded already and will be previewed by the speakers
next week (21 Feb 2022) before the meeting starts. There is information already online about
the conference how by going to website. In the upper right corner is the word Menu next to an"sandwich" icon (3 horizontal bars). This gets you to information about RootTech this year and past years. There are links to past keynotes and
classes and the ones I've watched are good. Much of this years program will be
on a YouTube channel, as well, but that will be cost money for the channel, unlike the Internet program. They leave the
entire program online on the website for a year following
the meetng, so right now you can watch anything from the 2021
RootsTech conference. My RootsTech 2021 class is stil online there now and my two classes for RootsTech 2022 will be on there starting 3 Mar with all the other new classes, keynotes, and labs. And those will be on there for a year until RootsTech 2023.
PAST ROOTSTECHS
Many of the most popular keynote addresses and classes from past RootsTechs
are available on the website. You'll be hooked if you stat watching
them, since they are so good. Since our subject (genealogy and family
history) doesn't go out-of-date, many old presentations are stil
valuable and can be used for classes. They are all findable by
topic, so if you want to set up a class or series of classes on a
family history topic, you could find a collection of classes on
that topic and show them to your group. For some reason, we don't
seem to think about RootsTech except when it the meeting time, but
tere is so much good information there that it would be good for
groups and FHCs to sponsor series of topics for discussion using
RootsTech videos. Even the ones inf foreign languages can be shown
with English subittles from the way they have it set up.
CONCLUSIONS
Keep RootsTech in mind when you need to find information about
some family history topic since it is loaded with good information.
You can set up your own Playlist, when you sign up, so you can keep
track of classes that interest you and that you want to watch later.
The themes are on Connecting and this includes information about the area, their customs, and even things like their recipes. Many of us think of genealogy and family history as only dealing with ancestors many years ago, but it really includes what we are doing ourselves now, since we are the ancestors of our descendants. Hence, RootsTech deals as much with the living as the dead. And, remember, the whole thing is free!
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