RootsTech 2020: I'm Back in Salt Lake City!

Yes, it's that time of year:  time to travel to beautiful Salt Lake City and join something like 25,000 other genealogists for that over-the-top production known as RootsTech!

I'm here because I was again fortunate enough to have the program committee accept one of my presentations for the conference.  My talk isn't until Saturday, however, so I have been attending other people's talks and learning all sorts of interesting things.

The conference started Wednesday morning, bright and early at 8:00 a.m., but I decided I couldn't face the world quite that early.  9:00 sounded much more reasonable.  That's when I went to a discussion session organized by FamilySearch.  They were talking to people who volunteer in their communities doing things related to genealogy.  The idea seems to be to find ways volunteers can help each other, both in joining forces and in sharing ideas.  It was an interesting and refreshing way to start the day.  I look forward to seeing what comes of it.

After I enjoyed a leisurely buffet lunch, I attended an informative session with Lara Diamond, who spoke on how to find relatives in Russian-language records if you don't speak (or read) Russian.  She discussed why it's helpful to learn how to recognize terms and your ancestors' names so you can identify them in records (coincidentally, some of the points I will be making in my Saturday presentation).  She also mentioned Genealogical Translations, a free translation group on Facebook that appears to have replaced one that was closed last year, which was great news.

Thursday morning at the conference once more started at 8:00, but I still couldn't make myself get going.  This time I began my day at 9:30 with Thom Reed's presentation about a FamilySearch initiative called Reclaiming Our African Roots.  One focus is preserving records and collecting oral histories in several sub-Saharan countries, many of which were the sources of people captured for the historic slave trade.  As much as I have enjoyed working with Thom over the past few years in relation to Freedmen's Bureau records, and while I hope the initiative does well, I have to admit I was frustrated at the use of marketing hype and imprecise terms used to generate enthusiasm.

An interesting and potentially very useful talk was given by Amy Williams, an academic at Cornell University, who spoke about a method to reconstruct an ancestor's genome by using the DNA of that person's children.  I'm hoping to be able to use the process to put together my mother's genome using my DNA and that of my two siblings, but I need to get conversant in Linux first.  The program used is not currently designed to conduct the process using DNA from half-siblings but might be in the future, so maybe one day I'll be able to do the same for my grandfather using the DNA from three of his children, each of whom had a different mother.  That could be extremely helpful in my search to find his biological father.

Of course, one of the best things about going to conferences is getting to see your genealogy friends face to face.  So far I've been lucky enough to run into Thomas MacEntee, Luana Darby, Sheri Fenley, Elizabeth O'Neal, Tierra Cotton-Kellow, Alice Burch of Utah AAHGS, Randy Seaver, Robinn Magid, and Nicka Smith (in addition to Lara and Thom) and finally have met Ellen Kowitt, Kim Thurman, and Rebecca Koford in person.  I can hardly wait to see who I run into during the rest of the conference!

Tierra and Janice at Wednesday's ProGen gathering

IAJGS Conference Preliminary Program Online

It's time to start planning your schedule for the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies conference in Boston this August!  The preliminary program has been posted online.  Besides simply browsing the complete list, you can search by topic, geographical focus, speaker's name, date, and more.

I already have a busy conference planned for myself, with sessions marked in almost every time slot.  Some of the priority sessions I've marked are "Interpreting 19th Century Russian Language Documents" on August 4 (even knowing how to read Russian, these are hard to work through), "Researching Your Ancestors' Food" on August 5 (what can I say, I like to eat), "Kishinev: History of Jews and Genealogy" on August 7 (my great-grandfather's six younger siblings were born in Kishinev, and the family lived there for more than 15 years), "Early American Jewish Research: Before 1870" on August 8 (I'm still trying to prove the connection of an 18th-century Jewish man in Virginia to his possible brother in Charleston and then to the family's origins in Germany), and "A Very Short Course in Hebrew for Family Researchers" on August 9 (I *really* need to learn Hebrew!).  The most important item on my schedule is my own talk on August 6 on finding and using online historical Jewish newspapers!

The conference runs August 4-9 and is being held at the Boston Park Plaza Hotel & Towers.  While I'm in the area, I found research I can do in person.  I have cousins who live near Boston, and we're going to get together and talk about our family.  In addition, I realized that Brockton is not far away, and I need to visit some cemeteries there.  I'm going to have a week crammed full of family history!

Can you OD on genealogy?

eBay Score: 1929 Atlas from USSR

I have to admit, I'm a geek about maps.  I learned how to read them when I was young.  I collect them.  I have lots of old maps from the early 20th century and several atlases.  And let's face it, old maps are very useful when you're trying to find places whose names have changed.

But I think this one is especially cool.  It's a 1929 world atlas published in Moscow.  So it has the Soviet/Russian names of places from that era, in Russian, which will help make them easier to recognize in documents.  And they're typeset, which makes it easier for me to read them!  (I can read handwritten Russian, but printed is so much better.)  But it also has that lovely "Soviet" perspective on the world that you can find only in period documents.

When it arrived in the mail, I opened it up to a random page and found ... California!  The scan above shows (starting in the upper left and going clockwise) orange groves in California, picking cotton in Georgia, and an agricultural area in Belgium.

Oh yeah, and when it was new, it cost 4 rubles and 50 kopecks.  The price is printed on the back cover.