A year ago I was in Salt Lake City researching in the Family History Library and getting ready for RootsTech to start. I was very fortunate to be able to attend RootsTech for the first time. One of the highlights was getting to meet Leisa Byrne and Jonny Perl in person! We’d been working on the DNA Painter user group for over 2 years and ‘chatting’ by email. Here’s a photo of us at the DNA Painter booth last year. Jonny is on the left, Leisa’s on the right, and I’m in the middle.
This year with the pandemic RootsTech is all virtual and FREE!!! From numbers I’ve seen over 430,000 people have registered so far. If you’ve not registered yet click on RootsTech to go to the registration page.
Also on the registration page are the Main Stage Streaming Schedule and the list of All English Sessions. For sections in other languages there will be subtitles in English on the screen. So we should be able to enjoy any of the presentations in a language that we are comfortable with. All of the presentations are prerecorded and will be available for a year, so you’ll have plenty of time to view as many as you want. The virtual Expo Hall opens at 5:00 PM Mountain Standard Time (MST) Wednesday, February 24. Many of the exhibitors will have special sales associated with RootsTech Connect, and there will likely be games to play at the booths just like there were in Salt Lake City last year. There will be FamilySearch employees and volunteers available during the conference for questions. It will be in the ‘Ask Me Anything’ tab on the RootsTech page. I’ll be there helping there on Thursday and part of Friday. Because this is a world-wide event you will be able to access all the conference features and the volunteers all day and all night until 9:00 PM MST Saturday, February 27 when the conference ends.
I have three short presentations on DNA Painter that will be in the DNA Booth. They will be shown for the first time on Saturday: ‘Getting Started with DNA Painter’ is at 5:00AM MST; ‘Adding My Heritage Data to DNA Painter’ is at 12:00 MST; and ‘Adding 23andMe Data to DNA Painter’ at 2:00 MST. I plan to be online to answer any questions that come up during that first showing for each of these.
This should be a very exciting conference. I’m looking forward to it!! Hope to see you there!
Patricia Coleman Genealogy 