All the rootstech streamed sessions are now online at https://rootstech.org/about/videos/
Click on any thumbnail image on that page to see the video play at the top of the page
Be sure to watch the Friday keynote, Judy Russell, the legal genealogist is amazing!
Jim Rader does a nice introduction to DNA for genealogists
A long time ago I received an email from the husband of a possible cousin wondering if his wife’s WALD family was the same as our WOLD family. Naturally I suggested a DNA test and the results just came in. Yes she is a member of our WOLDs and is descended from my gg-grandfather Jørgen Oleson Wold via my g-grandmother Maren Wold’s brother Carl (Charlie) Wold. Below are the faces of four generations of my new 3rd cousin once removed’s ancestors.
Now for the details of how we used autosomal DNA testing to confirm this …
Family Search has launched a massive indexing of obituaries project that needs citizen helpers. They had a very clever promotion at Rootstech – “Dead men tell no tales but their Obituaries do!” – with a pirate who strode about getting his picture taken with anyone who wanted to do that. That’s me with him in the picture on the left. Then they had prizes at their booth.
So the url for working on the indexing project is – https://familysearch.org/indexing/ – this one is fun! Please join in.
Play is part of being human and a mammal. All mammals play. Playing develops our skills in a safe environment. It’s great fun to run from a dragon in a game but in real life getting burned while you scramble over the gold would not be fun at all.
So why is genealogy like doing taxes for most people and not more like playing? In a game like angry birds, you know what you have accomplished so far and what your goals are. Genealogy programs do not save your place nor do they set your goals. They are just tools to manage your data and do not engage you the way a game does.
In a quick display of numerical scale he mentioned that there are 2.7 million paying ancestry.com members which sounded impressive until he pointed out that there are 2 billion Angry Birds players …
I really love the title Blaine Bettinger, the Genetic Genealogist, used for his talk -“Begging for Spit” …
Having test results from my two second cousins has been extremely useful for narrowing down which family line new matches are related on. So I would really like to get more cousins to test.
Blaine suggests using these three Es to guide you:
EDUCATE
ENGAGE
EXPEDITE
When discussing each of these, he stressed that you do not want to overwhelm your contact. That means no three page emails filled with technical terms! Make your request specific, short, and to the point. Make it visual and informative.
