The day before RootsTech 2013

I have finally arrived at RootsTech 2013, my first ever trip to Salt Lake City.  Some of you will know, from my Twitter feed, that I am no stranger to business trips to the USA, so arriving here on business feels quite familiar and comfortable.  The most challenging aspect of my travel yesterday, was the three and half hours spent queueing at Dallas airport to get through immigration, then customs and finally re-entry through security for my onward flight to Salt Lake City.

However, today has more than made up for any inconvenience suffered yesterday.  I spent most of the day at the APG Professional Management Conference, along with fellow genealogist, Marie Dougan, of Ancestral Consultants.  In the morning, we had a most interesting session on American court records, given by Judy G Russell, of Legal Genealogist fame.  Many of the lessons of this hands-on session, although using American court records, could easily be applied to UK court records, so I now feel inspired to try and use these more in my own genealogy practice.  Over lunch it was great to chat to Lynn Broderick, who blogs at The Single Leaf, whom I had met in February at Who Do You Think You Are? Live and Thomas MacEntee, of Geneabloggers.

In the afternoon I attended two fabulous genealogy marketing sessions:  First of all, Thomas MacEntee, of Geneabloggers,  talked about how to run an effective marketing campaign, largely based around new media marketing such as Facebook, Twitter, blogs and Pinterest. Thomas gave us lots of ideas on how to improve our social media presence, not least by using analytics more. Then Lisa Louise Cook, Genealogy Gems, showed us how to use YouTube in our genealogy marketing, which was very timely as I hope to be incorporating some videos from RootsTech into this blog over the next few days.

This evening, I attended the official bloggers dinner, hosted by FamilySearch at the Lion House restaurant,  which was simply fascinating, finally getting to meet so many genealogists whom I had previously known only "virtually", via Twitter or their blogs:

• Dear MYRTLE and Mr MYRT, of Dear Myrtle
• Amy Coffin of We Tree Genealogy Blog
• Nancy Shively of Gathering Stories
• James Tanner of Genealogy's Star
• Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings
• and the Ancestry Insider
• Finally, a special mention to Jill Ball, of Geniaus, who has been doing a fab job of looking after me as a new official blogger.

Amy Coffin, Dear MYRTLE and Mr MYRT

Jill Ball and Nancy Shively

I was made to feel very welcome by the RootsTech and FamilySearch team, who made a special point of introducing me as their first official blogger from England.  During dinner there were several presentations by the FamilySearch team, included some previews of tomorrow's announcements.  I won't spoil the fun by saying too much here, but suffice it to say that FamilySearch.org will be changing yet again (oh yes it will!), and in particular the home page will become much more "user friendly".  Here is a preview of what it might look like:

Watch this space for more details - and don't forget to watch the live streamed RootsTech sessions here to find out more!

Rosemary Morgan
London Roots Research