ROOTS & BRANCHES

First, the big news: Since the upcoming all-virtual “Pennsylvania’s Genealogy Event” has been swamped with registrations, sponsor Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania has extended the early bird discount pricing through next Saturday, July 15.

But possibly the bigger news is how many features of the event, which will run on the highly interactive Whova event platform from Aug. 5–12, keep taking on a life of their own, which will be great for the virtual attendees.

PaGE already had genetic genealogy guru Blaine Bettinger as one of its Keystone Keynotes speakers; now the event has added Your DNA Guide Diahan Southard to the Featured Speaker Sessions list.

The event already is scheduling “Gatherings”—less formal roundtables on topics ranging from ancestral foods to people from a certain county to an “all call” for everyone with Lutheran forebears—but there will also be “Exhibitor Gatherings” in which the event’s vendors will call the shots, as well as the capability for an registrant to start a “Meetup” on the fly about pretty much anything they want.

PaGE will also work to help registrants build their profiles in a way that will give them interaction with other attendees, primarily by adding items to their “Interests”—this can be places, ethnic groups, types of records, surnames, or anything else for which a registrant is looking. In addition to what the Whova event platform serves up, PaGE registrants to reach out to other attendees for one-on-one conversations, too.

The event’s structure goes like this: There will be keynote addresses on the opening (Aug. 5) and closing (Aug. 12) Saturdays of PaGE. In addition to Bettinger, those keynoters include FamilySearch’s Chief Genealogy Officer David Rencher; Adrienne Whaley from Philadelphia’s Museum of the American Revolution; material culture expert Lisa Minardi, formerly of Winterthur Museum and now with the Lutheran archives in Philadelphia; and Pennsylvania State Archivist David Carmicheal, who will have an exclusive video preview of the new State Archives building being occupied in Harrisburg.

 In addition to the keynoters, the middle days of the conference will include a large program of pre-recorded sessions on Pennsylvania topics from a mixture of familiar names as well as new presenters. These pre-recorded sessions will be dropped in batches on Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday of the conference for viewing at your leisure; best of all, most of these speakers have committed to doing live Q&A periods during the event a day or two after their presentations drop.

 Most features of the event will remain available for three months on the Whova app.

There are several registration options for PaGE, but the “All-Access” package offers everything over the eight days of the event for a GSP member discount price of $199 through the new early bird deadline.

For more information about the event’s program, go to the URL, https://genpa.org/

To register, go to the URL, https://genpa.org/programs-and-events/