logo - RootsTech 2015 600

logo - FGS 2015

The combined RootsTech/FGS 2015 Conference was truly a smorgasbord for attendees, with over 300 presentations on offer.

There were generally around 15-16 talks being held at any one time, it was impossible to get to every talk that you wanted to. So attendees had some hard choices to make.

Fortunately for many (both those who were there, and those who couldn’t attend), a few of these were live streamed and recorded, and are being put up the RootsTech website and you can view them for free. Seven are there already, with more to follow soon.

The listing for those recorded are as below …

THURSDAY
Keynote Presentation (Dennis Brimhall, Mike Mallin, Tan Le)
30 Pieces of Tech I Can’t Live Without (D. Joshua Taylor)
You’ve Mastered the Census and Basic Search, What Next? (Karen Auman)
What’s New at FamilySearch (Devin Ashby)
Getting Started in Genetic Genealogy (Diahan Southard)

FRIDAY
Keynote Presentation (D. Joshua Taylor, Laura W. Bush, Jenna Bush Hagar)
Innovator Summit Challenge Event
Building a Genealogy Research Toolbox (Thomas MacEntee)
Bring Your Ancestor Back to the Future (Anne Leishman)
The Write Stuff. Leaving a Recorded Legacy: Personal Histories, Journals, Diaries, and Letters (Valerie Elkins)

SATURDAY
Keynote Presentation (A.J.. Jacobs, Donny Osmond)
Finding the Living among the Dead: Using the Internet to Find Your Living Cousins (Amy Archibald)
Family History on the Go Using Phones and Tablet Apps (Crystal Beutler)
Personal History Triage: How to Tell the Best Ten Stories of Your Life (Alison Taylor)
Finding Your Family on Newspapers.com (Peter Drinkwater)

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To give you a taster of the keynote presentations, here is small portion of Tan Le’s most evocative and incredible talk. One of Thursday Keynotes, Tan is a Vietnamese refugee who lives in Australia, and she is a “technology innovator, and founder and CEO of Emotiv Lifesciences”. At RootsTech she shared her memories of her family and strength of her grandmother.

Unfortunately I didn’t get to the talks as I was busy with our our stand, but Dick Eastman wrote the following about it …

“At the end of her talk, Tan Le received a standing ovation. I don’t think there was a dry eye in the house. “I cannot possibly describe this talk properly. You HAVE to watch the video when it appears soon on www.RootsTech.org. You won’t forget it any time soon.”

So sit back, and make yourself comfy and watch some awesome presentations by some of the big names in the genealogy world. And remember to check back to see when more are online.

Click here for the RootsTech Videos

And if you check out the FamilySearch You Tube channel, you’ll find other videos from RootsTech 2015 too.