Ready for RootsTech?

 

                                                            Snow at the Salt Palace site of RootsTech March 2025

Have you signed up for RootsTech yet? It's that time of year again when the big conference happens in Salt Lake City. It didn't used to be such a big thing. I remember someone in my genealogy society talking about going to the RootsTech conference some time ago back when my society used to meet in person. (I miss getting together like that.)

Back then, when that person talked about attending RootsTech, I thought it would be interesting to check it out someday. Then I remembered that it snowed in Salt Lake City and the conference was in early March so I put it off. So I didn't get to see any of the conferences in the beginning years. Since then they've grown exponentially as we moved online during the COVID years and now the RootsTech conference reaches viewers in many corners of the world through the magic of technology.

I finally did get to check RootsTech out in person in 2025. There were many classes to choose from and sometimes I wondered if I would be able to get from one end of the Salt Palace Convention Center to the other in time for my next class. Planning distances became part of my strategy for the sessions I chose as well as figuring out which classes I would be able to follow up on later and which ones I could only see in person. And yes, it did snow while I was there but it disappeared quickly and I spent most of my time inside. 

Wikipedia distraction

 

Last year at this time, I was trying to make sure I had everything ready for a two week long family history foray. It had been a daunting task trying to get everything together. I've reached the point in my research where I've gone beyond the easier initial steps of filling in family knowledge. Now it's a case of picking some particular family branches to find out more about. That in-depth research requires more time and thought but, with the advances that have been made in what is available online, so much more history can come to light. Often that's where the stories hide.

I was in search of those stories when I sat in front of a computer at the FamilySearch Library in Salt Lake City. As I had prepared, I started with the research I'd planned. I was disciplined at first, taking various family lines further into the past but then, as so often happens, I got sidetracked. I stumbled on a line of ancestors who had Wikipedia pages! Oh, I know I could have done that research at home instead of spending my precious hours at the library leaping from page to page on Wikipedia but the hunt was on!

I did get back to my research plan eventually, but finding those stories written about people who were connected to my family tree was a thrill. Finding information written about my various Hinton connections felt almost like discovering a gateway ancestor to the past similar to attaching a family line to noble or royal lines whose histories were recorded. Although finding a real gateway ancestor would probably open up more doors into written histories. If only I could get back that far!

Stories to bring our history to life

 

Ever since I can remember, I've always wanted to be a writer. Maybe that's because I was an avid reader from the time I first held a book. The different ideas and scenarios I found in the pages helped me make sense of the world even if they were found in an Agatha Christie mystery.

Mysteries are my preferred reading material. I enjoy the investigation and eventual solution. Maybe it was those reads that showed me how to put facts together to come to a solution, much like the sleuthing done while hunting for facts about the lives of family who lived in the past. In those narratives too, a reader also sees the value of background information, the relationship between people, the usual habits of the deceased and what the larger part of society was into at the time, all have a bearing on the case.

Sometimes though, I read to find out more information about an historic era or events. Recently I picked up a book from my own overburdened shelves to find out more about one of those turning points in history, the plague. It's a time out of the realm of the ancestor hunt for the most part but my ancestors would have survived that time and probably yours did too. It was a horrendous long lasting event that shaped the human psyche.

The author of The Black Death: A Personal History, made an interesting choice in telling the story of the Black Death. Although an expert in the history of the medieval period, he chose to fictionalize his narrative to give the reader a better understanding of the slow creep of the news and how the villagers of a particular place in England reacted. Reading it gives me a more immediate understanding of events and how it felt to the people waiting for this particular calamity to fall. It's masterfully done and a way to bring dusty old documents to life. Would that I could translate the dusty documents I've uncovered in my own research into such a compelling narrative. 

Sources:

The Black Death: A Personal History, by John Hatcher, Da Capo Press, Philadelphia, PA, 2008 

Think before you post

 

It was a while ago, a matter of decades rather than years, when I first subscribed to Ancestry and was able to build my own family tree on there. That tree grew slowly. It's still very much a work in progress. Initially I'd hope that having a tree and information visible would be similar to those far away days of collaboration on genealogy message boards. But contact and collaboration on the Ancestry website were minimal at best. The rate of communication hasn't changed much since DNA testing and matching came along.

Something that I heard someone say in one of my genealogy groups along the way provided a possible clue as to why I wasn't getting any feedback on my tree. I'm not sure of her exact words but the gist of it remains. She indicated that she didn't look at family trees on the website unless there were a lot of photos and records attached to the tree because the lack of attachments meant the research of the tree's owner was suspect.

That may be one way of thinking of family trees that are bare of pictures and records but I have another. I didn't want to post the pictures and documents I'd found over the years because I didn't want them to be grabbed and copied ad infinitum. Besides some of the information in my family history files had been obtained under fair use (actually fair dealing in Canada), which I interpret to mean that the pictures or records I kept would be okay for personal use but not for publication. How then could they be placed on my family tree on a family history site to be fair game for any user to copy and publish on their own tree? As it was, I'd been unpleasantly surprised to see some of the information I'd sent to others back in the day now showing up attached to online family trees. Those items had been sent in the far off heady days of collaborating on the same family lines by snail mail and Rootsweb. When sending those items, I'd imagined them filling the recipients own family binders, never dreaming of how the online sites would expand and the possibilities they'd present.

So, if you see a bare family tree on a genealogy website like Ancestry, it doesn't necessarily mean that the owner's research is lacking. It might just mean that they are aware of the limitation mandated by copyright law. 

Research and mysteries

 

                                                Google map of the expanding area of my research in Cape Breton, NS

Even now when most research is done online, it can be a daunting and time consuming task. That's why it's good to have a goal in mind. That's why those searching for their family's history are advised to come up with research questions; something to shape their queries, something to tell them when they've reached their goal. Because you can't get there if you don't know where "there" is.

It's good advice but something I rarely do, although I probably should. I'm more likely to head in a general direction then get distracted along the way. Perhaps that's not the best practice for uncovering information about my ancestors' pasts but it can lead to some interesting discoveries. Many of those treasures being found by following those tantalizing facts just out of reach occasioned by intriguing finds that sent me off on a tangent to find out more about some event, place or person.

But perhaps I do follow the advice about setting a question in a way. Because I usually have a mystery that I want to solve when I embark on a new line of discovery. When I think about my current Acadian research, there are a few mysteries that I would like to solve. The main one, of course, is how the families I am interested in ended up back in Nova Scotia after the mass deportation in 1755. But there is another. How did the family of French Acadians that I'm interested in end up with the very Scottish sounding name McPhee?  

Exploring background for Acadian research

                                                   Some of the buildings at Louisberg in Nova Scotia

My focus lately has been on the Acadian family lines I married into so I'm searching for things related to French Canada. The other day I watched a webinar about New France called Epic Tales From New France: Dawn and Carol's Greatest Hits. While entertained by the two speakers and the stories they had uncovered in their extensive research into their family history in Quebec, I was struck by how when we talk about New France, the reference is usually to Quebec. Not that I have anything against that province but the family I'm researching wasn't in that part of the country. I want to find information about the Acadians, particularly about the family lines linked to my own family tree.

While Acadia was part of New France, at least according to Google, the contrast between the treatment of the two colonies was stark once the British took over. Perhaps that was also the case under French rule, maybe my research will uncover that fact or not. Their different treatment had a lot to do with the placement of the colonies and perhaps with their alliances too. So it looks like history and geography will come up in my research.

The contrast in how the French colonies were treated also affected the records available for research now. The speakers in that recent webinar were able to take the family trees they were researching far back into the past, to 8th and 9th great grandparents. They gave a brief overview of the extensive records they had access to. Too bad records like those aren't the norm for Acadian research.

A jump start on Acadian lines

 

                                                 Google map showing Isle Madame the site of my Acadian interest

At the end of 2025, I was getting ahead of myself on the planning front. At that time my aim for 2026 was to concentrate on North American roots in the family tree, concentrating both on my own ancestors who link back to America's colonial past by establishing the closer lines that eventually lead back to those more distant relatives as well as working on the Acadian lines of the family that I married into.

The Acadian lines came to the fore much sooner than I anticipated. A post on Gail Dever's blog, Genealogy à la carte, carried the news about a free virtual presentation, "The History of the Acadians: Through Tranquility, Turmoil and Tenacity". I registered right away and sat through Nicole Gallant-Nune's talk as she took the viewers through the saga of the Acadians including the great derangement. I've always wondered what the McPhees and related families went through before they ended up on Isle Madame.

Ms. Gallant-Nunes's advice was to look at the Acadian project on Wiki Tree. So I've gone back to that site adding to the miniscule tree that I started there. This time I'm adding the links that will take me back to the Acadians that I'm interested in. I'm also starting to pull from my shelves the books on Acadia that I've gathered over the years. It looks like it might be time to access the information inside. 

Sources:

Genealogy à la carte – https://genealogyalacarte.ca/ 

Wiki Tree - https://www.wikitree.com/