Saturday Night Genealogy Fun -- Your Favorite Online Class At RootsTech 2026

  From Randy (my cousin) over at Genea-Musings:

it's Saturday Night - 

time for more Genealogy Fun!!!

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

1)  RootsTech 2026 just finished today.  Did you watch any classes online?

2) Which online class was your favorite, perhaps the most informative, most helpful, or most entertaining, for you?

3)  Share your selected online class in your own blog post, in a comment on this post, or in a Facebook or other social media post.  Please leave a link to your post on this blog post to help us find your post.

Here's mine:

I attended RootsTech 2026 online Wednesday night and the next three days, as I have done every year.  This year, I did not do a summary each day on this blog.  I have not gotten much sleep the last few days, and with classes as late as 10 or 11 PM, I just haven't had the energy to write blog posts also.  

I took fewer classes this time because every year, I get overwhelmed and never go back to my notes and complete any research that I was so excited about after taking the classes.  I also never go back and watch any of the classes I missed, so I wanted to try a little more laid back, easier pace this year.  I have to say the ones I attended were, for the most part, great classes.  So it is going to be hard for me to just pick one favorite!

But pick I did.  My favorite class was New to German Genealogy? Start Here! by Katherine Schober.  I take a beginner German genealogy class every year because I am still chasing my biggest brick wall, my 2nd great-grandfather, George W. Schwalls, Sr.  I never make any progress.  However this class was different.  Katherine took her time and explained step by step how to proceed in finding out what town and state (or province) your German ancestor was from.  She gave us tons of resources to use.  I learned a lot, and I was not overwhelmed this time around.  I have already taken her advice and did a search on Newspapers.com for any reference to George, and I have a second action item on my list that she suggested.  I can't believe I was off and running before the conference was even over!

I must also give a shout out, though, to my most fun class.  It was Gravestone Symbols from A to Z by Cathy Wallace.  Cathy made this topic so entertaining, catchy and easy to remember, by using the ABC song to go over all the things you may see in a cemetery from an anchor to Zzzz's from a sleeping baby statue.  While I have seen most of these symbols before, Cathy made it stick in my head and showed me a couple unknown to me.