Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - Your Favorite RootsTech Connect 2021 Moment, Experience, Session and/or Feature

 From Randy (a cousin discovery!!) over at Genea-Musings:

it's Saturday Night - 

time for more Genealogy Fun!!!

Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to:

(1)  Did you attend the free and virtual RootsTech Connect 2021 conference this week?  What was your favorite moment, experience, session, and/or feature?

(2)  Tell us all about it in your own blog post, in a comment to this post, or in a post on Facebook.  

Here's mine:

As you all know, yes, I did attend RootsTech Connect 2021 virtually the last few days.  I'm going to combine this Saturday Night Fun Post with my Day 3 post about the conference.

Real Life started seeping back in today, so I didn't get to view as many sessions as I would have liked.  However, the ones I did see were fantastic!  Here's what I watched:

- Sensitive Subjects: Writing About the Hard Stuff with Ronda Lauritzen.  I loved this session.  First of all, she had the perfect voice to cover this material, all soft and whispery.  Second of all, she made excellent points and really handled a tough subject well.  The biggest thought I took away from her session is to examine your motive when delivering news you've discovered in your researching.

- Useful Tools for Finding German Ancestors with Dana Palmer.  When I am ever get 'brave' enough to try to research where my brick wall ancestor, George W. Schwalls, Sr., came from in Germany, this session will be what I refer back to to help me read those German records.  She provided excellent samples of the different types of print you'll find there.  

- Capture Physical Photos with Google Photo Scan with Chad Dike.  I will tell you right now that this very short session changed my life.  I love Google.  I use so many of their programs.  However, I did not know they have a photo scanning software!  I have already scanned so many pictures just sitting here this afternoon.  It is so much faster than my printer/scanner!  Google Photo Scan uses four points to scan your pictures into four parts that it stitches together and gets rid of any glare!  You don't even see it stitching, and I swear in many instances, the scanned photo looks better than the original!  Then you can go to photos.google.com (which is where I back up my phone photos) and these scans will be there.  You can download them to your desktop.  You can put in a description for every photo.  You can change the date so that they are put in order.  Plus you can add where the picture was taken, if you know.  It is amazing.  So this session wins "Most Useful" from this conference!

- Finding Your German Ancestor, Parts 1 and 2, with Richard Lynn Walker.  This presentation was very in depth and full of sources you can use to research your German ancestor.  He tells you exactly what you will need to find where in Germany your ancestor came from (information I'm still working on for George).  He explains where records are kept in Germany, and he gives many, many ideas and sites for finding the information you want and need.  I will be referring to his handouts constantly when I start that research adventure.  

I guess my favorite moment from RootsTech Connect 2021 was just getting in there and seeing what all was offered.  I was able to bounce from my Playlist to the Expo Hall to the Relative Connect to back to my Playlist without missing anything.  It was well done.  My only suggestion would have been that when you're picking your sessions, you had to click on it to read the description.  Then when you tried to go back to where you were, it took you all the way back to the top of the list.  This was frustrating and time consuming.  I was trying to cram in as much as possible!

Unfortunately I didn't get to have any experiences.  I didn't know about the Desktop Diner get together.  The Relative Connect was neat, but I only heard from one person.  And I was too busy watching sessions to contact anyone myself.  

My favorite session... oh gosh, that is hard.  I loved so many of them.  The best presenter was Savannah Larson of the Creating YOUR Organizational System sessions (3 parts).  One of my favorite sessions was Revealing Your Mother's Ancestors and Where They Came From by Roberta Estes.  She did a wonderful, easy-to-follow presentation on mitochondrial DNA, and it put me on fire to find my adopted great-grandmother's biological mother.  Along with that, What Do I do with Cousin Matches? with Beth Taylor was equally informative.  She made me want to make a spreadsheet.  

My favorite feature of RootsTech Connect was The Playlist page.  I loved being able to see my chosen sessions in one place and not run the risk of missing any of them.

I hope they will keep a virtual part of the conference in the years to come.  For those, like me, who cannot make it to Salt Lake City, it is a lifeline to help us take part.