RootsTech London 2019

In November I returned from a 2-week trip to England where I attended my first RootsTech extravaganza. I arrived the weekend before so I could spend a few days with relatives in Hailsham, East Sussex. The conference ran for three full days, and I squeezed in everything possible so as to maximise my time there. I was lucky and had won a free pass from John at Antecedentia.

Jill from Geniaus is an experienced RootsTech attendee and she organised a dinner the night before for us Aussies. Meeting a few other people was great, although I already knew most of them from previous conferences in Australia. It's great to catch up with genie friends anywhere, but especially in London. There were around 50 Aussies there, among the almost 10,000 attendees. At our conferences in Australia we're lucky to have 400 people, so this was like genealogy on steroids for me.

Jill & I at the pre-conference dinner

The conference was held at the ExCeL Conference Centre in London's Docklands area, which was an easy walk from my Canning Town accommodation. The Thames looked beautiful and calm each morning. ComiCon was on at the other end of ExCeL at the same time, and the range of costumes and the enthusiasm of those attendees was great to see.

View from ExCeL Conference Centre

View from ExCeL Conference Centre

The subjects were a mixture of basic and advanced family history, with a predominately UK focus, some European and Jewish strands, plus DNA of course. We could keep track of all our classes on an app, which had room allocations and a link to the handout as well. There were 11 classes in each timeslot. I started off by putting a star next to my favourites, but had to narrow it down to only one in each time, which was really hard. My clones will hopefully be operational by the next conference I attend.  I prioritised speakers that I had come all that way to hear, such as Jonny Perl, Maurice Gleeson, and Myko Clelland. At least one of the classes was oversubscribed and the extra attendees were not allowed to enter. I ended up choosing a basic FamilySearch talk, which was still great because David Rencher is a fantastic speaker. I still learned some things even after many years of family history research and conferences. To make sure this doesn't happen again the RootsTech organisers could ask us through the app to rank in order of preference the talks we want to go to, so they can calculate what size room is required.  

Keynote speakers were historian Nick Barratt (a favourite of mine), TV presenter Dan Snow, Olympian Kadeena Cox, and performer Donny Osmond. I'm a little (but not much) younger than his usual demographic of fans, so while he was speaking I took the time to look through the exhibition hall while it was relatively quiet. 

Exhibition hall 

My 3rd cousin, Cheryl, flew over just for the conference. Jill interviewed us and our main message was that the distance doesn't matter, just come anyway.

We tried to get as many Aussies in one place for a photo.....

Photo courtesy of Jill from Geniaus

Fellow UTAS alumni from the Diploma of Family History also gathered for a photo...

Regina, John, myself, Janet 

My 4th cousin, Penny, came over from Finland for one of the days, and I was thrilled to meet her, although we are both kicking ourselves that we forgot to take a selfie!

I would definitely come back for another RootsTech in London. I loved every single minute of my trip. One day I'll make it to RootsTech in Salt Lake City, when there's enough of a gap in more local conferences to attend, and a money tree starts growing in my back yard :)