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My Rootstech Wrap-up

Feb12

Each year at Rootstech seems better than the last. How they will top this year’s I cannot imagine. ‘My favorite thing’ was the Rogers and Hammerstein musical evening with the Tabernacle Choir, narrated by Oscar’s grandson Andy Hammerstein, which included learning a bit about the history of that remarkable family.

Other high points for me were actor LeVar Burton’s keynote talk (found online by Roberta Estes – click here), DNA expert Cece Moore’s keynote talk, and numerous really great presentations.

I particularly enjoyed meeting in person many people that I only knew from emails or by reputation like Curtis Rogers of GEDmatch, Dr. Yaniv Erlich of DNA.land, Gilad Japhet of MyHeritage, David Nicholson of Living DNA, and Louis Kessler of Double Match Triangulator (DMT see below).

Innovator Showdown

Another thing I really love at Rootstech is learning about the new products for genealogists, particularly those which compete in the innovator showdown.

I was really pleased to see a DNA tool make it to 3rd place, the Double Match Triangulator by Louis Kessler. This is a tool that lets you compare two match lists from family Tree DNA, giving you real triangulation. I mentioned it in my talk and will blog about it soon. A semi-finalist product that I found quite interesting, was the Cuzins android app which uses the familysearch world tree to show you how any two celebrities are related. Friends will be added soon.

News from the Genealogy Companies

There were many exciting announcements of new features from all the big companies which will provide material for several weeks of more detailed blog posts. Here is a quick list

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Party with Me on Feb. 10 at Rootstech 2017!

Jan11

Last year’s Rootstech saw the advent of a great new event, the MyHeritage after party on Friday night, with lots of fun games (no I cannot throw a bean bag well) as well as music, karaoke, prizes, food, and drink. A great tension reliever after a hard day focusing on wonderful talks.

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Shipley Munson and A.J.Jacobs on screen and on stage at Rootstech

I have five free party tickets to give out to my readers for this year’s after party on Friday February 10th. Everyone who completes my survey about my blog (click here) will be entered into a random drawing. You can also answer inline after the read more below. In addition, you can choose to do the questionnaire and not enter as well. Winners will be notified by email very soon.

This will be my fourth year at Rootstech and my third year speaking. My topic will again be DNA Triangulation, updated from previous renditions. This is one of my favorite subjects and I love to demonstrate how we used this in my family to confirm a shaky paper trail, as well as ways you can use this technique at the different companies.

Another point of excitement for fellow genetic genealogists is that our own wonderful Cece Moore is doing a keynote speech on Saturday.
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I4GG was a great conference

Oct23

Two days of talks in sunny San Diego with headliners Cece Moore and Blaine Bettinger, what a pleasure for the roughly 275 genetic genealogists attending. I always enjoy any talk by either of them but I had to miss a few to go to other talks, so I am really looking forward to the videos. The people who missed the conference will be able to purchase them in a few weeks from the i4gg site.

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Cece presenting the keynote

Those of you who overflowed the room for my talk on GEDmatch, thanks! My slides are always available at slides.com/kittycooper – this talk is called GEDmatch Basics. I also have a handout in the downloads section here on my blog.

So what other talks did I enjoy besides Cece and Blaine? Barbara Rae-Venter’s presentation of the Lisa project story had me on the edge of my chair and actually gave me nightmares. I don’t think I have ever had that happen before from a genetic genealogy lecture! Congratulations to all those DNAadoption.com volunteers who helped sort out that case!

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Leah Larkin presents endogamy

I loved that Kathy Johnston pointed out the ancestors that you can inherit X from come in a Fibonacci series of numbers for each generation.

But the surprise delight was Leah Larkin’s endogamy presentation. She is the new editor of the Journal of Online Genetic Genealogy (JOGG) at JOGG.info and has endogamy on her Cajun side. This is a very hard topic to explain and to deal with in your genes but she aced this talk and her slides were terrific.

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Slow Sourcing, better than no sourcing

Oct5

Congratulations to WIKItree for getting sources added to more than 22,000 profiles. Read the wrap up here – http://www.wikitree.com/blog/sourceathon-2016-wrapup/ … No thanks to me though, as I got tangled up in my first one before finally moving on to do a few more.

The WIKItree source-a-thon was really fun. I loved checking in to the hangouts (although I was not really there just at Utube and often after the fact) and hearing about how well all those other teams were doing, hundreds of profiles sourced. How wonderful! Never anything for team Europe, my team. Perhaps our sourcing is just harder or it was that we had no captain reporting in. In three hours I managed to source four people!

wikitreeunsourcedMaybe the first one I picked was just too difficult. So here is my sourcing experience.

I went to the unsourced profiles page and clicked on Europe. Within Europe I clicked on Norway since I figured my expertise with the Norwegian online archives plus all the copied farmbook pages I have on hand would help. None of my farms were listed on either page of 200 names except for one in the 1500s, too long ago. So I chose a person with a surname (usually a farm name) that a cousin of mine married into, Foss, which is actually a pretty common name in Norway.

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Source-a-thon Saturday

Sep29

WIKItree is kicking off Family History month with a three day sourcing contest startng this Saturday that includes $4500 in door prizes, including one from me! See http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Source-a-Thon for the details and click here for for the impressive prize list.

For those of you not familiar with WIKItree, it is a wonderful collaborative world family tree that integrates DNA tests extremely well. Read about it in my article on collaborative world trees.

WIKItree has a really nice, easy way of adding sources explained here. http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Sources

Personally, I use the familysearch catalog to get the full reference for any book I have used, like those Norwegian bygdebuks.

Any other Norway team folk out there?