Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

First keynote speakers announced for RootsTech 2025

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The first four keynote speakers have been announced for RootsTech 2025, the giant genealogy conference sponsored by FamilySearch. It will be held March 6-8, 2025, both in-person in St. Lake City and virtually. Those four speakers are:

  • Author Ndaba Mandela (grandson of Nelson Mandela)
  • Prominent artist Dana Tanamachi
  • Olympic Gold Medalist Tara Davis-Woodhall and her husband, Paralympic Gold Medalist Hunter Woodhall

To learn more about these speakers, check out this page of the RootsTech website.

My experience attending four (I think) RootsTech conferences in person is that the keynotes are outstanding. Even if I didn’t think I had an interest in the speaker (I’m looking at you, Donny Osmond), I always ended up enjoying the talk and gaining something from it. I’m sure these keynoters, and all the rest they’ll announce in the coming months, will be great.

Registration is now open for the conference. The fee to attend in person is $129 for a three-day pass or $79 for a one-day pass. The virtual conference is free of charge (but requires registration). Here’s a preview of the class lineup with a schedule promised soon.

Both options for attending the conference are terrific. I’ve attended both in-person and virtual RootsTech conferences and speaking for myself, I get a lot more out of attending in person. When I’m there I can forget about family responsibilities and focus on my genealogy. I can meet fellow genealogists and see the latest products and services in the Expo Hall. I also would come in a little early so I could spend some time at the Family History Library.

The virtual conference has the advantage of being less expensive and less effort. However, when I register for the virtual conference, I always have the best of intentions but I have a hard time prioritizing it. The result is I’m seldom able to devote the time I want to the conference since I’m juggling home and work responsibilities at the same time. I’m definitely less focused on my genealogy if I’m attending virtually.

If you’d like to whet your appetite for the 2025 conference or get a feel for what you might learn, visit the on-demand library of past RootsTech keynotes and classes.

I won’t be attending the 2025 conference but if you’re tempted, I encourage you to give some serious consideration. It’s a great way to deepen your research!

 

My thank you to you: 25% off Orderly Roots Bundle

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Today is Thanksgiving here in the U.S. I always like to reflect on the things I’m grateful for on Thanksgiving. This year the list is especially long. And one of the items on that list is you, my Organize Your Family History community. I’ve been writing this blog for a dozen years and I am so grateful for its wonderful readers.

As an expression of gratitude, I’m offering 25% off my Orderly Roots Bundle. It’s normally $39.99 but if you use the promo code THANKS, you’ll get $10 off until Sunday, December 1, 2024 at midnight central time.

If you subscribe to my mailing list, you should have received an email yesterday with this offer. (But you don’t have to be on the mailing list to use the coupon code!)

Thank you for reading, commenting, and supporting Organize Your Family History! I hope you have a wonderful time with your family history research this weekend!

Thanksgiving is a great time to create history for our descendants

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For those of us in the U.S.,  it’s Thanksgiving week. I originally wrote this Thanksgiving post in 2016, and I like repeating it every year. Happy Thanksgiving to all my readers! I am grateful for you!

This Thanksgiving week, I’ve been thinking about how the ordinary lives of my ancestors are endlessly fascinating to me. As I slowly plow through my great great grandfather’s Civil War pension file, I get very excited when I come to a form he filled out 125 years ago that has a little extra information in it (like the names and birth dates of his children). Any peek into what his life was like is a special treat.

It got me thinking about how mundane aspects of our lives today might be really interesting 100 years from now to the people below us on the family tree.

Of course, we fill out fewer paper forms now. And genealogy will probably look very different in the twenty-second century. But I think photos and records will always be valuable.

This year, as we celebrate Thanksgiving (or really just go about our lives), we have the opportunity to create history for our descendants. We can be mindful of our legacy as we’re taking pictures. We can take care to label them (or add metadata to digital photos) so future generations know who the people in the photos are. We can do oral history interviews and carefully preserve them with labels for future generations.

If you have older relatives around your Thanksgiving table, I urge you to ask questions and preserve those conversations for generations to come (as well as for your own genealogy research). I sure wish I had. Wouldn’t it be great to put your hands on a recorded interview with one of your ancestors? You could be the person making that possible for your descendants.

Thanks to smartphone technology, it’s so easy for us to record conversations and take videos. Let’s do that while we can and mindfully tag and back up those recordings. (And hope that the medium will still be readable decades from now.) Or we can do what Stacy Julian does and ask our relatives to fill out a simple form.

As much as I urge my organizing clients to part with paper or other items that don’t serve any purpose any longer, I do sometimes encourage them to hang on to documents or photographs that might be of interest to their descendants. I encourage you to be mindful of that and store those items that so that they might be passed on to family-history-minded descendants when you pass.

Remember: Every day we have the opportunity to create history.

Photo by Robert and Pat Rogers via Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.

Quick Tip #45: Have a genealogy email address

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Here’s the next in my occasional series of bite-size Quick Tips. Click on the Quick Tips tag for my other Quick Tips. Because I tend to write longer posts, I wanted to provide a quick-to-read (and quick-to-write) post every now and then on a small topic that pops into my head. This one could turn into a time saver!

Create an email address for genealogy

Keeping track of email is a challenge for the best of us. (You do not want to see how many emails I have in my inbox right now!) One way you can make genealogy life a little easier is to create a dedicated email address specifically for emails related to your research. So if you are reaching out to cousins, repositories, or DNA matches you send your inquiries from that address and use that address on any contact forms. How you create a new email address and filter the responses depends on your email client, so I won’t go into that here. I just want to plant the seed that having an email address dedicated to genealogy might make your life a little bit easier!.