RootsTech 2024
From 29 February through 2 March, I was at RootsTech, which is a huge annual genealogy convention. It’s hard to tell how many people participate because they sell millions of tickets for the on-line event, which I’ve done the past couple of years. The problem with going on-line is that there is so much stuff that it’s hard to decide which presentations are worth watching, but there are also all the distractions of home, so I end up not watching a lot. Buying an in-person ticket includes access to all of the on-line presentations for an entire year. There’s also a huge exhibit hall, with all of the major genealogy companies (and many I’d never heard of) contributing. And there were a couple of hundred in-person presentations to attend.
Anyway, I flew in the day before (Wednesday) and my flight to Salt Lake City (via Los Angeles) went smoothly enough, though my arrival gate and departing gate were pretty much as far apart as any two United gates at LAX could be. United uses Terminal B at SLC and, to get out of the airport, you have to walk half the length of that terminal, walk through a half mile long tunnel, and then walk much of the length of terminal A. The signage to get to TRAX (the SLC light rail system) wasn’t great, but I found where I needed to go and was quite pleased to learn that the system was free for people attending RootsTech. It was also a bit of a hike to my hotel from the nearest station. In short, it was going to prove easy to get plenty of steps in during the convention. For what it’s worth, I stayed at the Residence Inn, which was okay, though the bed was too soft, so my back was aching after a couple of days. There are several hotels closer to the convention center, by the way. If I went again, I might consider one of the hotels right across the street.
There were three or four classes I was interested in during every time slot of the event. I marked all of them on my schedule and chose during the time between the sessions. I also spent time visiting the exhibit hall, but won’t really discuss that since I didn’t take notes there. But I will note that several (all?) of the major companies did have mini-seminars about using their products. And I did learn about a few products that could be useful, e.g. some of the archiving materials.
The first session I went to on Thursday was The Quest for Hidden Ancestors - Genealogy Tips from Nancy Drew by Ellen Kowitt. This wasn’t really focused on things I didn’t already know, but I like Nancy Drew and I’ve found Ellen to be an entertaining speaker before. Basically, she pulled out examples from the Nancy Drew novels that are relevant to genealogy research and listed plenty of resources. And that did include a few I had not been aware of previously, e.g. interment.net for burial records and Deep L for translation. She also had a particularly good list of resources for historical maps. Entertaining and informative was a good way to start the day.
The next session I went to was What’s the History in Your Family History? by Rachel and Matt Trotter. This was described as adding historical context to your family history and covered sources like oral histories, oral traditions, diaries, and timelines. While there were a couple of example, It wasn’t really what I was looking for, since it was largely U.S. focused and somewhat more recent history for the most part.
The hottest subject in genealogy these days seems to be artificial intelligence, so (after a mediocre and overpriced lunch in the exhibit hall), I went to a session on Using AI Tools to Expand Your Research Universe Part 1: Chat and Search Tools. by James Tanner. He described the goal as to help organize, analyze, and get insight from data to solve novel problems. He listed several subfields of AI, including cognitive computing, computer vision, machine learning, neural networks, deep learning, natural language processing, fuzzy logic, expert systems, and robotics. He also talked about practical uses of AI, including detecting illegal activity, business apps (e.g. digital personal assistants), generative AI, and data processing. He noted that large language models are what has changed recently and mentioned a few general purpose products, e.g. Microsoft Copilot. I found his talk way too general and would have liked some actual examples of using AI in genealogy. I had considered going to one or more of the talks in his series of presentations, but decided that they were unlikely to be worth my time based on this one.
The next top talk I went to was History, Family History, and Families From the Global to the Personal by Dr. Wanda Wyporska. Her main point was that genealogists are historians. She talked about geography as a genealogist’s worst friend, primarily in the context of forced and voluntary migrations. Her ethnicity is a mixture of Eastern European and Caribbean, which led to an interesting twist on this. The main point was that people connect with communities in various ways. Unfortunately, most of the discussion was centered on race, which is not of much interest to me. So, while her talk was reasonably interesting, I didn’t find much of it of any practical relevance.
The last talk I went to on Thursday was Squeezing all the Info Out of Your Matches by Kate Penny Howard. This was a fairly basic presentation on DNA and was focused on finding the Most Recent Common Ancestor (MRCA) with a match. She talked about things like searching across as many platforms as possible ad then building out descendants of the MRCA. She also recommended using DNA Painter. Since her major emphasis was on things like looking for who an unknown parent is (either because of adoption or unexpected DNA results), I didn’t find this particularly relevant.
Overall, I thought that only one of the five talks I went to on Thursday was notable. Fortunately, I had somewhat better success with finding useful sessions the next two days.
The first talk I went to on Friday was Researching the Canadian Census and Early Census Substitutes by David Allen Lambert. Most of this was a review of what information censuses (some federal, some by province) contained in each year. For example, the 1901 census included complete birth date (not just year), year of immigration, and year of naturalization. He also listed where each census can be found, including Family Search, Ancestry, and Library and Archives Canada. The most recent one on Ancestry is 1931. This is useful for me, because of a great-uncle who I know went to Canada (and, later, entered the U.S. via Buffalo. There is a note on another immigration record (for someone who is almost certainly another member of that part of my family) involving an inquiry in Toronto. So, it looks like it may be possible to get more insight into that situation.
The next talk I went to was The High Five - Key Documents for Successful Records Retrieval at NARA by Cecilia McFadden. She talked about record locations and finding record set numbers. But I wish she had traced through some actual examples in detail, as I got rather lost in some other dry information.
One of the highlights of the conference was What’s New and Exciting at My Heritage by Gilad Japhet. He started out with an example of artifact DNA. In particular, he was able to have DNA extracted from stamps, which led to finding half siblings of his great-grandfather. I thought this was completely mind-blowing. Of course, it’s not yet ready for commercialization and is probably too expensive for people who aren’t the CEO of a genealogy company, but the potential is amazing. I definitely have postcards with stamps I assume were licked by my grand-mother and I probably have envelopes sealed by various other deceased ancestors.
He also talked about recent (AI-based) features that have been added to My Heritage. Photo Dater, which estimates when historical photos were taken, looks likely to be useful. AI Biographer, which converts facts into a narrative holds no interest for me, since I know how to write, but at least it includes sources. There’s also an AI Record Finder, which uses an AI chat to search historical records. I think that is probably most useful for beginners. OldNews.com is focused on historical newspapers. Unfortunately, it only covers eight countries initially and, other than the U.S. (and possibly Canada) has limited utility for me. There were several other things he mentioned, which were of less interest to me, but it was a very good presentation.
My most disappointing talk of the day was Why Should I Map My Chromosomes by Tim Janzen. The goal is to determine which portion of your DNA comes from which ancestor. It really only works for 2nd, 3rd, and 4th cousins. And, more importantly for Ashkenazi Jews like me, endogamy is a problem. Aside from that, his presentation was hard to follow because he did things like referring to the 4th column in a dense chart on a slide, but really meant what was actually, say, the 8th column. Overall, this was pretty much useless for me.
The last talk I went to on Friday was Are You an Ethical Genealogist? by Dr, Penny Walters. This was interesting, but I’d have preferred a panel discussion to a lecture. She mostly focused on situations with genuine reasons pointing to two different sets of actions. For example, approximately 12% of DNA tests result in someone finding an NPE (which stands for either “not parent expected” or “non-parental event” depending on which you prefer.) An adoptee can obviously have good reasons for trying to find a birth parent, e.g. understanding their medical history, but there is also potential to hurt a parent who raised them who may not have known of the situation. There are also cases involving an individual vs. their community, truth vs. loyalty, individuals vs. the community, and justice vs. virtue. Any decision you make about privacy and confidentiality vs. transparency has consequences. Each person has to decide for him or herself what information to disclose about their family tree. (Since there are a few people on my tree with readily findable criminal records, this is of direct interest to me. On the plus side, those people are easy to research.)
I started Saturday with a presentation by Jarrett Ross on Success With Jewish DNA: How to Overcome Issues with Endogamy. This was probably the single most immediately useful session I went to at the conference. He also talked about double cousins and 3/4 siblings, e.g. the result of marriage to a sibling of a deceased spouse. He noted that as you get further back, the differences between endogamy and non-endogamy are greater. More importantly, he had several practical suggestions re: dealing with DNA results in endogamous communities. I already knew some of what he suggested about what level of centimorgan matches to investigate. But he had other tips I hadn’t really thought of before. For example, you can try to build out the tree of a potential match to a specific level. He also suggested looking for connections to towns within 30 miles. Overall, I came away with actionable information, which is always a good thing.
The next presentation I went to was AI-Assisted Genealogy: The Family History of the Future by Daniel Horowitz (from My Heritage). Some of the uses of AI he discussed were language translation, market research, key word research, and customization. Applying those to genealogy tasks, he talked about tombstone translations, summarizing and extracting information from documents, transcribing handwritten records , extracting information from newspapers (including locating OCR text). Within MyHeritage, some tools include an AI Record Finder (which lets people find data without filling in a form), Photo Tagger (which looks useful, but he did warn of its addictive potential), He also talked about some other tools I can’t imagine any reason I’d want to use (e.g. one to turn yourself into a historical figure). Still, it’s good to know what’s out there, even if you want to use only some of it.
After that, I went to Research Planning for Efficiency and Accuracy by Mindy Taylor. Most of her focus was on setting up research logs, including citations. That’s the sort of thing I know in theory but don’t do well with in practice, as I have found myself repeating searches multiple times. Something as simple as noting the date a particular search was made could be very helpful, especially since new sources become available frequently. Er, yes, I do need to get organized.
The final presentation I went to was Working with WATO (What Are the Odds) by Leah Larkin. WATO is a tool from DNA Painter and is intended to help identify an unknown parent, grandparent, or great-grandparent. Anything further back is beyond the limits of autosomal DNA. That means it is fairly unlikely to be of any significant help for me, since I know who all my ancestors in that range are. In addition, it doesn’t work well with endogamy. There’s a newer tool called Banyan DNA which might be more useful, so that’s something to keep in the back of my mind.
It had started snowing in the late morning and I had a nasty slushy walk back to my hotel. In the morning, I got a Lyft to the airport. My flight was delayed first because it was overbooked and they needed to get some volunteers to switch flights. And then it was delayed further for de-icing. Fortunately, United held my connecting flight at DEN long enough for me to sprint to that gate and I made it home on time.
Overall, I thought the conference was reasonably valuable. I came home with a fair amount of stuff to follow up on. And, of course, there are lots of on-line sessions I should try to find some time to watch.
Anyway, I flew in the day before (Wednesday) and my flight to Salt Lake City (via Los Angeles) went smoothly enough, though my arrival gate and departing gate were pretty much as far apart as any two United gates at LAX could be. United uses Terminal B at SLC and, to get out of the airport, you have to walk half the length of that terminal, walk through a half mile long tunnel, and then walk much of the length of terminal A. The signage to get to TRAX (the SLC light rail system) wasn’t great, but I found where I needed to go and was quite pleased to learn that the system was free for people attending RootsTech. It was also a bit of a hike to my hotel from the nearest station. In short, it was going to prove easy to get plenty of steps in during the convention. For what it’s worth, I stayed at the Residence Inn, which was okay, though the bed was too soft, so my back was aching after a couple of days. There are several hotels closer to the convention center, by the way. If I went again, I might consider one of the hotels right across the street.
There were three or four classes I was interested in during every time slot of the event. I marked all of them on my schedule and chose during the time between the sessions. I also spent time visiting the exhibit hall, but won’t really discuss that since I didn’t take notes there. But I will note that several (all?) of the major companies did have mini-seminars about using their products. And I did learn about a few products that could be useful, e.g. some of the archiving materials.
The first session I went to on Thursday was The Quest for Hidden Ancestors - Genealogy Tips from Nancy Drew by Ellen Kowitt. This wasn’t really focused on things I didn’t already know, but I like Nancy Drew and I’ve found Ellen to be an entertaining speaker before. Basically, she pulled out examples from the Nancy Drew novels that are relevant to genealogy research and listed plenty of resources. And that did include a few I had not been aware of previously, e.g. interment.net for burial records and Deep L for translation. She also had a particularly good list of resources for historical maps. Entertaining and informative was a good way to start the day.
The next session I went to was What’s the History in Your Family History? by Rachel and Matt Trotter. This was described as adding historical context to your family history and covered sources like oral histories, oral traditions, diaries, and timelines. While there were a couple of example, It wasn’t really what I was looking for, since it was largely U.S. focused and somewhat more recent history for the most part.
The hottest subject in genealogy these days seems to be artificial intelligence, so (after a mediocre and overpriced lunch in the exhibit hall), I went to a session on Using AI Tools to Expand Your Research Universe Part 1: Chat and Search Tools. by James Tanner. He described the goal as to help organize, analyze, and get insight from data to solve novel problems. He listed several subfields of AI, including cognitive computing, computer vision, machine learning, neural networks, deep learning, natural language processing, fuzzy logic, expert systems, and robotics. He also talked about practical uses of AI, including detecting illegal activity, business apps (e.g. digital personal assistants), generative AI, and data processing. He noted that large language models are what has changed recently and mentioned a few general purpose products, e.g. Microsoft Copilot. I found his talk way too general and would have liked some actual examples of using AI in genealogy. I had considered going to one or more of the talks in his series of presentations, but decided that they were unlikely to be worth my time based on this one.
The next top talk I went to was History, Family History, and Families From the Global to the Personal by Dr. Wanda Wyporska. Her main point was that genealogists are historians. She talked about geography as a genealogist’s worst friend, primarily in the context of forced and voluntary migrations. Her ethnicity is a mixture of Eastern European and Caribbean, which led to an interesting twist on this. The main point was that people connect with communities in various ways. Unfortunately, most of the discussion was centered on race, which is not of much interest to me. So, while her talk was reasonably interesting, I didn’t find much of it of any practical relevance.
The last talk I went to on Thursday was Squeezing all the Info Out of Your Matches by Kate Penny Howard. This was a fairly basic presentation on DNA and was focused on finding the Most Recent Common Ancestor (MRCA) with a match. She talked about things like searching across as many platforms as possible ad then building out descendants of the MRCA. She also recommended using DNA Painter. Since her major emphasis was on things like looking for who an unknown parent is (either because of adoption or unexpected DNA results), I didn’t find this particularly relevant.
Overall, I thought that only one of the five talks I went to on Thursday was notable. Fortunately, I had somewhat better success with finding useful sessions the next two days.
The first talk I went to on Friday was Researching the Canadian Census and Early Census Substitutes by David Allen Lambert. Most of this was a review of what information censuses (some federal, some by province) contained in each year. For example, the 1901 census included complete birth date (not just year), year of immigration, and year of naturalization. He also listed where each census can be found, including Family Search, Ancestry, and Library and Archives Canada. The most recent one on Ancestry is 1931. This is useful for me, because of a great-uncle who I know went to Canada (and, later, entered the U.S. via Buffalo. There is a note on another immigration record (for someone who is almost certainly another member of that part of my family) involving an inquiry in Toronto. So, it looks like it may be possible to get more insight into that situation.
The next talk I went to was The High Five - Key Documents for Successful Records Retrieval at NARA by Cecilia McFadden. She talked about record locations and finding record set numbers. But I wish she had traced through some actual examples in detail, as I got rather lost in some other dry information.
One of the highlights of the conference was What’s New and Exciting at My Heritage by Gilad Japhet. He started out with an example of artifact DNA. In particular, he was able to have DNA extracted from stamps, which led to finding half siblings of his great-grandfather. I thought this was completely mind-blowing. Of course, it’s not yet ready for commercialization and is probably too expensive for people who aren’t the CEO of a genealogy company, but the potential is amazing. I definitely have postcards with stamps I assume were licked by my grand-mother and I probably have envelopes sealed by various other deceased ancestors.
He also talked about recent (AI-based) features that have been added to My Heritage. Photo Dater, which estimates when historical photos were taken, looks likely to be useful. AI Biographer, which converts facts into a narrative holds no interest for me, since I know how to write, but at least it includes sources. There’s also an AI Record Finder, which uses an AI chat to search historical records. I think that is probably most useful for beginners. OldNews.com is focused on historical newspapers. Unfortunately, it only covers eight countries initially and, other than the U.S. (and possibly Canada) has limited utility for me. There were several other things he mentioned, which were of less interest to me, but it was a very good presentation.
My most disappointing talk of the day was Why Should I Map My Chromosomes by Tim Janzen. The goal is to determine which portion of your DNA comes from which ancestor. It really only works for 2nd, 3rd, and 4th cousins. And, more importantly for Ashkenazi Jews like me, endogamy is a problem. Aside from that, his presentation was hard to follow because he did things like referring to the 4th column in a dense chart on a slide, but really meant what was actually, say, the 8th column. Overall, this was pretty much useless for me.
The last talk I went to on Friday was Are You an Ethical Genealogist? by Dr, Penny Walters. This was interesting, but I’d have preferred a panel discussion to a lecture. She mostly focused on situations with genuine reasons pointing to two different sets of actions. For example, approximately 12% of DNA tests result in someone finding an NPE (which stands for either “not parent expected” or “non-parental event” depending on which you prefer.) An adoptee can obviously have good reasons for trying to find a birth parent, e.g. understanding their medical history, but there is also potential to hurt a parent who raised them who may not have known of the situation. There are also cases involving an individual vs. their community, truth vs. loyalty, individuals vs. the community, and justice vs. virtue. Any decision you make about privacy and confidentiality vs. transparency has consequences. Each person has to decide for him or herself what information to disclose about their family tree. (Since there are a few people on my tree with readily findable criminal records, this is of direct interest to me. On the plus side, those people are easy to research.)
I started Saturday with a presentation by Jarrett Ross on Success With Jewish DNA: How to Overcome Issues with Endogamy. This was probably the single most immediately useful session I went to at the conference. He also talked about double cousins and 3/4 siblings, e.g. the result of marriage to a sibling of a deceased spouse. He noted that as you get further back, the differences between endogamy and non-endogamy are greater. More importantly, he had several practical suggestions re: dealing with DNA results in endogamous communities. I already knew some of what he suggested about what level of centimorgan matches to investigate. But he had other tips I hadn’t really thought of before. For example, you can try to build out the tree of a potential match to a specific level. He also suggested looking for connections to towns within 30 miles. Overall, I came away with actionable information, which is always a good thing.
The next presentation I went to was AI-Assisted Genealogy: The Family History of the Future by Daniel Horowitz (from My Heritage). Some of the uses of AI he discussed were language translation, market research, key word research, and customization. Applying those to genealogy tasks, he talked about tombstone translations, summarizing and extracting information from documents, transcribing handwritten records , extracting information from newspapers (including locating OCR text). Within MyHeritage, some tools include an AI Record Finder (which lets people find data without filling in a form), Photo Tagger (which looks useful, but he did warn of its addictive potential), He also talked about some other tools I can’t imagine any reason I’d want to use (e.g. one to turn yourself into a historical figure). Still, it’s good to know what’s out there, even if you want to use only some of it.
After that, I went to Research Planning for Efficiency and Accuracy by Mindy Taylor. Most of her focus was on setting up research logs, including citations. That’s the sort of thing I know in theory but don’t do well with in practice, as I have found myself repeating searches multiple times. Something as simple as noting the date a particular search was made could be very helpful, especially since new sources become available frequently. Er, yes, I do need to get organized.
The final presentation I went to was Working with WATO (What Are the Odds) by Leah Larkin. WATO is a tool from DNA Painter and is intended to help identify an unknown parent, grandparent, or great-grandparent. Anything further back is beyond the limits of autosomal DNA. That means it is fairly unlikely to be of any significant help for me, since I know who all my ancestors in that range are. In addition, it doesn’t work well with endogamy. There’s a newer tool called Banyan DNA which might be more useful, so that’s something to keep in the back of my mind.
It had started snowing in the late morning and I had a nasty slushy walk back to my hotel. In the morning, I got a Lyft to the airport. My flight was delayed first because it was overbooked and they needed to get some volunteers to switch flights. And then it was delayed further for de-icing. Fortunately, United held my connecting flight at DEN long enough for me to sprint to that gate and I made it home on time.
Overall, I thought the conference was reasonably valuable. I came home with a fair amount of stuff to follow up on. And, of course, there are lots of on-line sessions I should try to find some time to watch.