My Trails into the Past

Calling all Genea-Musings Fans:  It's Saturday Night again -  Time for some more Genealogy Fun!! Our assignment tonight (well, Sunday morning) from Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings is to:.  1)  'Twas the week of RootsTech 2025, and all through the house, the genealogists were checking their RootsTech schedule.  What classes did you absolutely love this week?  2) Tell us about your favorite RootsTech 2025 classes in your own blog post, in a comment on this post, or in a Facebook post.  Please leave a link on this post if you write your own post. Here's mine: I was fortunate this year to attend RootsTech in person. It was touch and go the few days before because I seemed to have a mild case of the flu. Maybe flu vaccinations work! I attended a total of six sessions, three each on Thursday and Friday, and spent all day Saturday at the FamilySearch Library until it was time to head to the airport and home, hence, why this is being written on Sunday. I wrote a...

We woke up to snow on the ground from an overnight storm. There wasn’t much and the sidewalks weren’t too icy. My first session was learning about resources in Kentucky from Susan Court, a member of the Kentucky Genealogical Society, “Kentucky's Public and Publicly Available Records.” She had so much to talk about that she ran out of time, but her syllabus and slides are available for download.  The second session was from Tim Bingaman on “Keys to Researching in Pennsylvania.” We learned about the typical resources, the dates vital records are available, and places where to conduct on-site research. During the lunch break, we visited the exhibit hall. I stopped at the Kentucky Genealogical Society’s booth to add stickers to their map of where my ancestors lived. I visited the Viking Cruises booth and spoke to an agent about river cruises in Germany. I played two games at other booths and won prizes, including a cell phone desktop holder. I stopped by the NGS booth and gave Gena ...

I was up bright and early, as always happens to me in a new location. The first sessions began at eight, so we were on our way to the convention center by 7:30. Our plan was to view sessions that were presented live and not recorded. The recorded sessions we could view when we got home. Hopefully, Facebook friends will talk about the sessions they enjoyed seeing live-streamed. The first session was to listen to Rick Sayre's presentation “Finding your World War I or WWII soldier.” His 14-page syllabus is filled with advice on methodology and has many links to online sources. I thoroughly enjoyed it. He was also giving another session on the National Archives, but I was working the BCG booth, so missed it. The second session was Judy Russell’s talk called “In That Case: Using Published Court Cases.” She showed us the two websites Case.law and CourtListener and the kinds of information we might find in these published cases. The third session was Michael Lacopo’s “I am Poor, Obscure...