Well, after a number of delays flying to Salt Lake City, Utah from Manchester NH, I finally arrived in Salt Lake City for the FGS/RootsTech conference on February 10th.
It was my hope to be able to make Blog posts while the events were happening, but along with many others who were unable to do so, I failed in that area. Many others choose to wait until after FGS/RootsTech to make their own posts for a very good reason, which will become apparent after reading this post.
The area for the conference at the Salt Palace Conference Center is
HUGE, MASSIVE, VERY LARGE and any other similar word you can dig out of a Thesaurus. I had originally stated that there would be over 10,000 people attending, but during the opening session for RootsTech on Thursday the estimate is now put at over 30,000 people. There were many times that there was hardly any room to move in the Exhibit Hall, especially on Saturday when a large contingent of young people visited with their families.
I spent my first full day in Salt Lake City at the Family History Library in the hope of solving a brick wall for a client. This was an interesting and frustrating case, which I was eventually able to solve while in Salt Lake City. This is such an interesting case that I will be making a future Blog post to explain how I solved this mystery, in hopes that it may help others go through the thinking process to help solve their Brick Walls. If you have not made the pilgrimage to the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, I encourage you to do so at least once. The Library is HUGE and holds floor to ceiling cabinets of microfilm and books on 5 floors covering 142,000 square feet.
Photo: J. Paul Hawthorne
Photo: Leslie Brinkley Lawson Most of my time was spent wandering around the Exhibit Hall dressed in my Sherlock Holmes outfit or my Kujawy (Polish folk dress from the region in Poland where my ancestors are from). I enjoy doing this at genealogy conferences for a number of reasons. First and foremost I like to attract attention to myself in order to talk to people about what I do. I am able to explain to them that I am a professional genealogist who specializes in Polish and French-Canadian family history research. Being dressed in costume is a wonderful ice-breaker. Another reason I do it is to provide something different, interesting and fun for the particular conference I am at. I also dress in costume to help encourage others to dress in period costume of their ancestors. I hope someday to see lots of people dressed in period costume of their ancestors. I found some people dressed in period costume in the Exhibit Hall for the FGS/RootsTech conference. Some people wore kilts, others like those at the
History Lines booth were all wearing period costume. On Saturday there were a number of RootsTech people who wandered around in period costume. This was wonderful to see and I hope it encourages more people to do this. Take a look at some of my photos, which are posted at the end of this Blog.
The opening sessions had a number of big names. On Thursday we were honored to meet the hosts of Genealogy Roadshow, On Friday, former first lady Laura Bush and her daughter Jenna talked about life in the White House and what it was like as a family. Donny Osmond talked about his life growing up on Saturday.
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