ROOTS & BRANCHES

One of the many changes to my life in this last Pandemic year has been trading the traveling life—going to in-person genealogy conferences as aa guest lecturer and often as vendor of my book—for participating in virtual events instead.

A year on into this shift, I’m seeing both trends to this online experience as well as contrasts. Tehre are a lot of ways “to skin a cat” when it comes to virtual conferences.

The Ohio Genealogical Society conference held earlier this month clearly wanted to make its virtual conference much like its successful in-person annual events as possible.

OGS ran its conference over the usual length of four days and even those lectures that were pre-recorded were assigned time spots and within a few days of the conference, access is shut down. The society had a virtual vendor hall and did its best to promote the vendors by allowing them to each sponsor a lecture.

The National Genealogical Society conference coming next month will have two days of presentations sandwiched in between special events before and after (in part as a nod to its absorption of the old Federation of Genealogical Societies, in which NGS pledged a commitment to some of the previous FGS activities) as well as a large On-Demand pre-recorded program that will debut in mid-June and be available for months.

The NGS conference will be held on a virtual platform called Grip with “matchmaking” capabilities that will enable attendees to connect with other registrants and vendors.

For the virtual conference of the International German Genealogy Partnership (conflict of interest reminder: I’m the co-chair), we’re running it for eight days total with six days of On-Demand presentations and many “virtual social” opportunities such as Connections sessions and virtual happy hours that will be bookended by marquee presenters giving living lectures (Additional reminder: Those using the coupon code EARLY can get the lowest price for a conference package when registering at the URL, https://playbacknow.regfox.com/iggp2021 —but only for a few more days until the end of April!)

My personal bottom is that while I’m looking forward to seeing my many friends from the larger genealogical community at in-person conferences in 2022, I hope that event planners will realize that virtual necessity was not an inconvenience requiring a full return to “the Before Times” at the first opportunity.

I hope they are mindful of the opportunities that virtual presentation offered—such as appealing to attendees from an unlimited area of the globe—and look forward rather than backward to keep those opportunities available for blended conferences with remote presenters and livestreams to attendees in the future.