I’m just back from working three days in the ArchivDigital booth at the combined Rootstech / FGS conference in Salt Lake City. Billed as likely to be the biggest genealogy conference ever held, the attendance didn’t disappoint. Already on the first day, one could hear rumors about the attendance in hotel elevators. At first people were in disbelief that there were 15,000 people. Then the rumored number rose to 20,000. The highest number I heard while moving between floors was 25,000. We all wondered if that could really be true. Part way through, I did hear an official figure that was just a hair below 22,000 and that walk-in registrations would be increasing the number.*
At the booth, it was a fun three days of answering people’s Swedish genealogy questions. They ranged from “Which one is Switzerland and which is Sweden?” to “How do I get started?” to “I’ve traced my ancestor to this point, what should I do next?” With a crowd as big as this one, there were plenty of people who wanted to know more, and with nearly 200 vendors, there was something for everyone.
On the flight back to Chicago, I sat next to a man who spent a good deal of the flight editing a single photo on his phone. Every so often when he made some change that I could see out of the corner of my eye, the reflex to see what had happened tore me from my book. The photo was nothing that that he had taken with his phone. It must have been scanned from a photo taken perhaps in the 1980s. I noticed at one point that it was a part of a much larger picture. The screen was zoomed in on a single face. It was zoomed so much that it was grainy and the slight imperfection in the original focus was obvious. One sign of the photo’s age was that it was quite yellow and I think he was trying to correct the color. He worked and worked at it and there is only so much you can do editing pictures on a phone. Clearly, there was something deeper going on. There was a story behind that photo. There was only so much that could be done with that photo and he must have done everything many times over. It wasn’t the photo that he was working on so much as the story. A story that he knew and that I could only guess. A family story was there in that photo and that is part of what genealogy is all about. He reminded me of that, even though I was the one returning from the biggest family history conference of all time.
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*When rumors about the attendance started to spread in the elevators and hallways, I wondered who would be the first to quip something along the lines of “Man, the Utah State Thruway is closed,” but perhaps that Woodstock reference occurred only to me.