Saturday evening on Feb. 27 marked the close of RootsTech Connect 2021. Although the event has come to an end, it will continue to live on, virtually. The numerous video sessions that were recorded will be available for free, for a full year. More about that later in this article …

First, some numbers:

Stats for Nerds

A few days before the conference began, the total registration for RootsTech 2021 was just over half a million. That number had essentially doubled by the end of the conference, as over a million people from 200+ countries joined the proceedings. That is an amazing leap from the 20,000+ at the Salt Palace last year and the 100,000 or so who signed up for streaming.

The Family History Guide website had visitors from 74 countries. The top countries in terms of website pages visited were:

1. US
2. Canada
3. UK
4. Australia
5. Germany
6. Mexico
7. Brazil
8. France
9. New Zealand
10. Argentina

The Expo Hall

Below is a look at what visitors saw from The Family History Guide Association in the Expo Hall at RootsTech Connect. You can visit the booth site, as long as the link remains active (the Chat feature has been disabled).

Classes and Sessions

You can search for recorded sessions on the RootsTech site here:

https://www.familysearch.org/rootstech/rtc2021/search

These include four short classes for The Family History Guide, as well as the two partnership videos mentioned in this blog post. Do a search for “The Family History Guide” to find them all.

Panel Participation

Angelle Anderson, Marketing Director for The Family History Guide Association, was asked to be a breakout room moderator representing The Family History Guide. This was for the 21 Day Family Connections Experiment “Desktop Diner – Meet & Greet with Presenters.” The 21 Day Connections Experiment is a community project dedicated to helping individuals connect more with family, past and present, using family history activities and more. Her breakout room was attended by RootsTech participants from Australia, Ohio, Utah, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Canada. One of the participants said that she loves to tell “everyone she knows” about The Family History Guide because it makes doing family history so much easier and less intimidating. Angelle mentioned that it was fun to watch those who knew about the site start telling others about it in the breakout room.

Miles Meyer, Education Director for The Family History Guide Association, participated in a live panel at RootsTech, “Inspiring Children and Youth to Love Family History.” The goal of the panel was to provide ideas for attendees to use as part of their toolbox when working with youth. Miles was able to talk about The Family History Guide Activities and chat with the participants to see how they were thinking about applying these ideas for family history activities.

Chat Conversations

There were quite a few positive conversations in the Chat feature of the online booth. Two of the most frequent things we saw were people discovering The Family History Guide for the first time, and visitors with research questions who were able to find helpful resources on the website.

Here are some sample excerpts:

“The Family History Guide is wonderful! I didn’t know about this resource and I look forward to exploring it more.”

“Oh, wow! just found your web site thru the exhibit hall. I’m a retired librarian contemplating developing a family history research course for my former community college and your resources would really save me re-creating wheels.”

Visitor: “I feel pretty comfortable researching my American and UK ancestors. However, I get nervous when starting to research other countries, especially when I am not familiar with the language or places. What advice do you have for me?”

The Family History Guide:  “The Family History Guide has pages for most countries. You can select the Country tab at the top of the page and then select the location. That will provide resources and information on best practices for a variety of record types. Some countries will break it down even further. For example, the US pages will go down to resources for counties. Check the QUIKLinks at the bottom of the country pages. Those will send you directly to record collection search pages.”

Another visitor, from Peru, was familiar with the website and loved it. She didn’t know she could see the website in Spanish (using Google Translate) and was really happy to find out about that.

What’s Next …

From what we’ve heard, it’s almost a given that there will be an online conference for RootsTech Connect 2022, along the lines of what we just experienced. Whether there will be a live experience as well—a hybrid of sorts—remains to be seen. Whatever the venues, we look forward to RootsTech Connect 2022!