RootsTech was held this past week in Salt Lake City, Utah. For those who could not attend, some of the lectures were available via live streaming on the RootsTech home page. They are now available as an archived version. The Tennessee Genealogical Society had Saturday’s lectures broadcasted for their members to watch. It was a great opportunity to watch the lectures and discuss them afterwards.

Here are a few things that I learned from Saturday’s lectures:

Lisa Louise Cook, creator of Genealogy Gems and just released her new book, How to Find Your Family History in Newspapers:

• iTunes has some great genealogy podcasts. Itunes can be downloaded for FREE.
• iTune U is where universities and colleges have uploaded lots of great educational information. How can this assist in genealogy? Great information on history, the wars and technical issues can be of great benefit.
• Google has a new search feature, Blogsearch. Now you can enter a keyword in and see what blogs are out there. For example, you can blogsearch a surname or a location and see who may have started a blog on that topic and/or refers to that topic on a regular basis.
• I learned that as I blog or write my article, Google is looking for “keywords” within it. So, writers should use these keywords such as genealogy, family history, their surnames, etc so Google will bring it up in their searches. So, if you are blogging about the surname, Griffin, using that surname and the locality of this family within the blog will help bring possible cousins to you via the Google search engine.
• Lisa Louise Cook made the comment, “a blog is like your own personal message board.” I don’t think I will ever look at my blog the same again. I never thought about it as a tool to reach out and find family members quite the way she described it.

Ron Tanner: With lots of humor, he gave the Future of FamilySearch Family Tree lecture. He covered the following updates to FamilySearch.

• The new Family Tree site
• Tanner stated that “The goal of the Family Tree is to gather the most accurate, sourced, and complete genealogy that can be found and to make this information freely available to everyone, preserving this data for generations to come.”
• Emphasis on sourcing
• Open Editing to fix mistakes other’s made within FamilySearch and a place to explain why you came to that conclusion.
• Collaboration
• Discussion feature
• Tanner’s conclusion, “The FamilySearch Family Tree, which will be included in the www.familysearch.org website, will allows all users to correct any bad data or source conclusions, and they can collaborate on ancestors in an attempt to reduce research duplication and to preserve for generations that most accurate representation of common ancestors.”

Don't forget to visit the RootsTech Download Page and take advantage of the handouts of ALL the wonderful lectures.