RootsTech 2014

Most of you know I have turned into a major Family History nerd over the past couple of years, so when I heard about RootsTech (the largest family history conference in the world) being held in Salt Lake City, I was dying to go.  With Burke and LeeAnn's support (LeeAnn watched Daphne for us on Friday while Burke worked and I was at the conference), I drove up to Salt Lake on Thursday, February 6 to spend the night at Josie and Rick's snazzy new condo in South Jordan.  I was so excited to spend some time with my dear girl friends as Whitney and Josie had agreed to go to the Friday session of the conference with me and it would have been the first time in many years that we would all be together for longer than a few hours.  When I got to Josie's house, however, all of our plans started to unravel.  Whitney texted to say that she had just returned from a business conference in Toronto and was so exhausted she wouldn't be able to make it down.  Then, within a few minutes of being in the Kelly home I found out that Rick had been let go from his job completely out of the blue just hours before and the anxiety of their situation was causing Josie horrendous stomach pains.  It was the worst possible night I could have stayed with them and I felt terrible for interrupting such an unsettling time, especially as they have dealt with ridiculous amounts of stress and turmoil over the past year.  (Thankfully, Rick has accepted a fantastic job in New York City now and they actually moved last week!  Bitter sweet.)

RootsTech at the Salt Palace - I had never been inside here before.

That night I could hear poor Josie throwing up all night upstairs, so I snuck around quietly at 6 AM and let myself out, knowing she wouldn't be up for a day of presentations.  I was a bit disappointed to be doing the conference alone, but still so excited to be there.  The speakers were fantastic and I learned all sorts of interesting things, like "secret" search engine techniques, how to locate Irish relatives when so many records were destroyed during their revolution, how to put "meat on the bones" of your family history stories by information found in census records, etc.  The exhibition hall was full of booths and technologies that I had no idea even existed!  I was very impressed by all I saw and heard.

At lunch, I met the Kirby family at the Clark Planitarium and watched an amazing movie about the Hubble Telescope and later that night I returned to their house for dinner and then joined my parents and Amy at Zakia's middle school musical production of "Thoroughly Modern Millie."  It was by far the best middle school production I have ever seen with a cast of 150 kids!

The next day, the Kirbys and my parents all came with me to the free "LDS Family Discovery Day" at RootsTech.  Although I had enjoyed the presentations the day before, the opening devotional left me in tears, with a determination to renew my family history efforts and take those precious ancestors through the temple.  There was an entirely different spirit throughout the Saturday LDS classes as the focus shifted from finding ancestors as a hobby to finding ancestors because their souls and your souls are eternally linked to one another.  There is a very real power in this work.   At one point during the morning devotional, they brought up a couple who thought their family history work was done, then an actor came out on stage and told them about herself and how she had not yet been added to their family tree or had her temple work completed.  She plead for them to link her eternally to her family and then revealed all the ancestors linked through her that also had been neglected.  It was so beautiful, so moving.

I'm so glad I had the chance to go to Rootstech and would highly encourage anyone with an interest in family history to not only try to get there in person some day, but to enjoy 19 of the presentations from this conference FREE via video recordings found HERE.  You can learn so much from these videos and it's almost just as good as if you had been there yourself.