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Friday 22 March 2013

Family Stories Getting Our Family to Engage

I have been watching the livestreaming from Rootstech at http://www.rootstech.org/ and in this post I will discuss the main points I have gleaned from the first day Thursday 21st March 2013.

ThursdayPresented by findmypast.com
8:30 AMKeynote – Dennis Brimhall, Syd Lieberman, Josh Taylor
11:00 AMThe Future of Genealogy - Thomas MacEntee and pane
l1:45 PMTell it Again (Story@Home) - Kim Weitkamp
3:00 PMThe Genealogists Gadget Bag - Jill Ball and pane
l4:15 PMFinding the Obscure and Elusive: Geographic Information on the Web - James Tanner


The message from the morning sessions can be summed up for me with the following phrases.
How do we get the younger generations involved more.
What are we leaving for our descendants of our lives.
Storytelling brings others into your world and helps engage those who may think family history/genealogy is boring.
We need to use technology to get our messages across.
Do we need technology designed for genealogy? 
Surely social media should be treated as modern day letters and we should be saving our tweets and facebook posts?
We need to think what our descendants want to know about us.
There are plenty of official records but are these enough.
Will our descendants have access to official records and what will these records say about us.
The future of genealogy is in our hands.
We need to make the right choices.
Do you want someone to be interested in what you have done, if so how are you going to get them to pick up that book, look at that photograph or document, listen to that story and visualise that moment in time and how that person may have felt, where they were and what living conditions were like.
With the information we have in our records and on the internet we need to paint a picture to Tell Our Story to engage Our Family.

If you have not managed to see the presentation by Lisa Louise Cooke  on using Google Earth I would recommend you try and catch up with her DVDs as I believe this is a great way to visualise your heritage and it can be updated.

Also have a look at the article in the April 2013 edition of the Who Do You Think You Are magazine discussing a world tree.

Above all we need to SHARE if we want to GROW.