Hello and good morning from Salt Lake. I’ve just finished up attending RootsTech and it was fab. I think the over-arching new understanding I gained was this: Imagine all the available genealogical data as kernels of wheat. This wheat with modern technology can now be harvested or gathered into one huge silo or place. No problem there. But think of all the steps to make your sandwich bread between those stored kernels and your plate. With the advent and use of modern technology “all” (certainly in quotes) the available genealogical data can be gathered into one place……… can be microfilmed, digitized, copied, etc. And of course, FamilySearch and Ancestry are in a race to be that one place, but that’s another story. Just imagine most all the answers to most all your genealogical questions and/or problems available to you via the Internet!! That’s the goal of course. Just like harvesting wheat into huge silos, harvesting names, dates and places into one humungous database. But what we mere mortals don’t understand is HOW all that information is morphed into words that we can access………. that was the “Tech” part of RootsTech. It takes an army of teckie-geeks (bless them!) to tackle the million problems involved with turning these bezillion bits of data into bytes for our use. At RootsTech some of these problems were highlighted and I understood some/most of it and certainly enough to be impressed and thankful for those youngsters and their zeal, knowledge and enthusiasm.
At this conference I shared hugs with several tour family folks. I visited with Joy Price, Loni Gardner and Trudy Schenk and with Henrietta “Hank” Christmas (and her handsome hubby and friend who will be coming with her this next December), with Jane VanTour, with Arlene Amodei, with Ruth Bishop and Jan Healey, with Christine Mueller and David Kroska from years past…David says he’s coming this year and will bring his beautiful daughter, Alena… and Cecily Kelly. Maureen MacDonald and I were roommates! Of course I saw Leland, Tara and Dale and Leland was selling Flip-Pals like the proverbial hot cakes. Thomas MacEntee was very in evidence too, he being one of the blogging world’s smilingest bigwigs.
Donna, aka Mother Hen, until next time.