ROOTS & BRANCHES

RootsTech 2023, smaller than in the past but still the world’s largest genealogy conference by far, is just a week in the rearview mirror.

This year’s theme was “Uniting” — uniting people, traditions, stories, memories, technology, innovation, communities and families.

The conference itself was a great opportunity to reconnect with many people in the family history community … in a lot of cases, people I hadn’t seen since 2019!

I had the opportunity to meet with three folks I’ve each known for a few years and had the opportunity to “unite” in various ways.

There’s Diahan Southard, best known by her trade name Your DNA Guide, but rapidly expanding to other brands. It was great hearing about the contractors she employs for everything from social media to finances.

But of all the things she does, I’m most fond of having opted in to receive her “Monday Minute with Diahan Southard.” These highly digestible brief thoughts are a weekly highlight for me! We need sometimes to step back and take perspective—and the “Monday Minute” columns provide that.

And Rich Venezia, who trades as Rich Roots and has carved out a huge and growing niche that a leading researcher and lecturer on immigration records (I keep telling him he needs to do a book on this subject since there is no comprehensive guide to immigration and naturalization records; he reminds me that he’s so in demand that his turnaround time for research is more than a year!).

Venezia’s also been a leading voice pushing back against proposed fee increases by the U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services for records (Note: there’s a deadline of tomorrow for genealogists to comment … se the “Records Not Revenue” site at the URL, https://www.recordsnotrevenue.com/)

And then there’s Katherine Schober, the owner of Germanology Unlocked, who just like Southard has managed to create a bigger-than-a-cottage industry—in Schober’s case, revolving around German cursive script in particular and translation of German-language documents more generally, and also needing a bunch of assistants.

Schober’s webinars are now drawing thousands of people and she’s become a major force in German genealogy (and was a great publicity chair for the virtual international German conference in 2021!).

It was fascinating to hear the “shop talk” from the three of them as they deal with the perils and rewards of entrepreneurship.

As a genealogist approaching the sunset time, I’ll admit that I have some “proud papa”-type of moments as I see the next generation of family history businesses come on strong.

They are some of the folks “uniting” the people in the genealogy space for the work yet to come!