It's Over - SLIG, APG, RootsTech

I had intended to blog daily through SLIG, the APG conference, and RootsTech. What a joke... who had the time? I thoroughly enjoyed every day of the last two weeks, but it was exhausting.

It was the first time I have been able to attend SLIG, the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy, and it was well worth the time.  I took John Colletta's Beyond the Library course which was all about manuscript repositories and state, federal and private archives with a lot of methodology thrown in. John is a great speaker and teacher who sprinkles his talks with personal experiences.  Now I need to buy his book Only a Few Bones and find out what really happened to the Ring &, Co., store and it's people.

The APG Management Conference got me all fired up to start my next career.  There are times when I wish I was twenty years younger.  How I want to be like many of the genealogists who are my age with years of professional experience under their belts. As the Ann Landers or Dear Abby saying goes, where will you be in five years if you don't do it now?  So, I'm networking, increasing skills, working toward earning a CG...getting started.

RootsTech was crazy. A combination of a genealogy conference and Comdex. The Microsoft play pavilion was never really full, that I saw, but did give the entire conference a different feel. The age demographic was like an inverted normal curve...lots of young guys and older folks, not too many in the middle. Thomas Mackintee was there with his beads and Geneabloggers ribbons. I got one for the first time.  Seeing as I started this blog sometime in the early 2000's it's about time, although if I blogged more it would help. I put my ribbons on my badge for APG, SCGS, NEHGS, FamilySearch Wiki Contributor, ProGen Study Group, and NIGS but was in the minority of attendees wearing the ribbons. I wonder if this fad has waned? It still is a discussion starter. Nice way to meet people.

The biggest issue seems to be revisions to GEDCOM, as it should be. All of the software products have customized their databases, especially their source citation systems, and users are not aware that everything does not transfer with GEDCOM.  At this point they are calling the new GEDCOM  GEDCOM X <http://www.gedcomx.net/.> or betterGEDCOM.  Brightsolid's (do you capitalize the b if it starts a sentence?) entry into the US market with a pay-as-you-go concept for census access was also a big discussion point. Who'd ever heard of brightsolid before RootsTech? Actually they are a British company that does FindMyPast.co.uk and ScotlandsPeople.com.  Randy Seaver has blogged about the new CensusRecords.com.

The 1940 census is the newest thing for us users.  As the census will come out in pure digital format not digitized microfilm, we get it quick but no index.  Indexing is easy and should be fun if you can index an area you are interested in.  Go to <https://www.familysearch.org/1940census> and sign up to index.

I think my problem with blogging is that I put too many topics in one post.  I'll write again about RootsTech.