The lure of RootsTech

 

                                                              The Salt Palace where RootsTech was held in 2025

It was around this time last year that I was thinking about going to Salt Lake City. I've been to the genealogist's Mecca many times in the past with different groups. They were wonderful trips all of them, whether roughing it with the BCGS group at the low cost Carlton Hotel (sadly it closed, then burnt down), or staying at the Plaza Hotel next to the Family History Library, now FamilySearch Library, with other groups like the Ancestor Seekers, I've enjoyed my time there. (Apparently, the Plaza will also be closed soon).

Visiting Salt Lake was especially productive in the time before online databases. We'd spend hours at those microfilm viewers often from the time the library opened until it closed. But genealogy research has come a long way since those days. Technology has transformed the way we search and genealogists are often early adopters of new tech that could help them make connections with their pasts.

It was because of this eagerness to embrace new ways of doing research that the first RootsTech conference was launched in 2011. I had never made it to the conference in the past although I was happy to watch the online content once that was made available in the later years of the conference. But last year, a friend asked me if I wanted to attend in person. I said yes.

RootsTech was a wonderful experience and I'd be interested in going again especially as I now know what to expect. Also, the research we were able to do before the hordes came in was great. But in 2026 I'll be back watching online even though I still have lots of short sessions to catch up with on my playlists from previous years. Have you registered for RootsTech for 2026 yet?

Looking at family history from a different perspective

 

What's your favourite way of  looking at your online family tree? For me, it's the vertical view on my Ancestry tree. There I can see how far back I've added my direct lines. It also reminds me that one of my tasks is to concentrate on adding collateral lines. That's not going very well.

Today when I logged onto my Ancestry account, I check out one of the hints which showed me the hinted tree information in a vertical manner which I found hard to read. It was disconcerting too, as I couldn't get back to my own family tree right away. But everything went back to the way I liked it after I hit the right buttons.

That was when I took a closer look at the view options and chose "Fan". That gave me a fan view of the tree with me as the centre and the generations back to my 2 x great grandparents showing. What's more, it included the dates for every person including the outer tier with those 2 x greats. That highlighted the missing years in the outer edge of my fan chart. Something else to work on.

Changing my family tree view showed the possibilities a new perspective can bring to the same old data. Maybe there was something to those charts we drew up back in the old days before genealogy went online. I'll try to remember to look at my data in different ways going forward.

* The tagline for Julia Creet's The Genealogical Sublime is: Public History in Historical Perspective

DNA update

 

Well, it's finally here. The DNA origins update that Ancestry was promising gives a finer break down of European regions, placing a label that reads NEW each time it has added a more granular region to testers' results. It's nice to see my Netherlands region made the grade in this version. As I remember that faded from view in a previous update. I have no problem believing in that ethnicity because some of my ancestors came from the Western Isles of Scotland and from an area of England once known as the Danelaw. That would be a Viking link but I have no idea if it is from my Scottish roots or my English ones. 

I'm still trying to figure out the Cornwall origin that Ancestry stuck me with in the previous update. It appears again in this latest update. I even went as far as looking for Cornish surnames, but didn't find one that appeared both on the list and in my family tree. I'm not sure about the Cornish connection but maybe it comes from as far back as the Netherland/Viking one.

The most baffling result though has to do with Irish origins. There is still the same disconnect between my Irish roots and the information on my son's origins update. According to Ancestry, I have no origins in the Republic of Ireland. They have my Irish links confined to Northern Ireland in Donegal and something called Central Scotland and Northern Ireland. I don't know about the Donegal part but Central Scotland takes in Islay and I've documented my links to that island. So it confirms what I already know. 

The part that I really don't get, is that according to Ancestry, I have no origins in what is now the Republic of Ireland. That doesn't really jibe with their results for my son who received an estimate of 13% Leinster origins solely from his maternal side. According to Diahan Southard, different results could be from the different chips used by the company depending on the timing of the DNA tests. So I'm wondering if the best idea would be to take another DNA test to get updated results. Maybe that would even result in more and different matches. 

Family moves

 

                                          Scarecrows on Charlottetown streets were a new custom since I had lived there

Some researchers are lucky to have generations of their families living in one small town or village far into the past. In that case studying the local history makes a great deal of sense. Building up a picture of the environment for the decades your family lived in the locale and the people they lived among can paint a picture of their lives while filling in the social context.

Other researchers come from families who immigrated, staying in the new city or country and continuing their lives there. But what of the people and families who rebounded: heading to a new place, living there for a while and then heading back to where they came from or somewhere in the vicinity. What did they anticipate when they went home?

There are members of my past family who did just that. My maternal grandfather came to Canada from England in 1911 and returned in the 1930s. Did things turn out as he expected? He probably couldn't have predicted another war at that point any more than he could have anticipated the depression that sent him home. But still, the country he returned to hadn't stayed still while he was gone. Things change sometimes so much that a person can barely recognize the place.

That's what I've seen in my own life, having lived in Halifax for two different periods as well as doing the same in Vancouver. Every time was different. Things, place and people had changed. Any of our ancestors who moved back and forth would have been able to attest to that.