RootsTech is an annual conference held in Salt Lake City focusing on everything genealogy and family history. It’s held around the end of February at the Salt Palace Conference Center in Salt Lake City.

One of the highlights of RootsTech has been to catch up with my cousin Ted Larson from down in Carlsbad, New Mexico. It has been a lot of fun meeting up with him and finding out all that’s going on in the Larsen family. Unfortunately, unless something changes, he says he isn’t coming next year. I’m not sure we will, either.

The Good

RootsTech has literally a couple thousand sessions during the four-day conference on practically every topic from beginning research to esoteric research topics that relatively few genealogists are interested in … and everything in between. This year there were one session in the morning and three sessions in the afternoon available with thirty to forty choices of classes to attend at that time.

The Expo Hall is packed with vendors, agencies, and companies. Its a great place to learn about products and capabilities. Everyone is very friendly and happy to be there. It really is a good atmosphere.

They keynote speakers are always outstanding, inspirational, and timely. My favorite this year was Scott Hamilton, the Olympic Gold Medal ice skater.

The Bad

There are too many session at the same time and too few are repeated. I’d much rather more session times with fewer choices. The popular sessions, even though they were being held in the larger rooms, filled quickly. That meant we needed to leave a session early to be able to have a chance of getting into the session of choice coming up next.

The Ugly

RootsTech has far outgrown the Salt Palace Convention Center. I suspect that’s the primary reason my cousin is seriously considering not coming next year. There were so many people that moving from one session room to another took a Very Long Time, and heaven forbid making one’s way from the ballroom to the session rooms over the viaduct to the other side of 2nd West. A half-hour was half-too-short to make that trip through the crowds. I’ve no idea what other facilities with more space might be available in Salt Lake City…. The number one complaint I heard while trying to get from one place to another or while standing in line for a session was how crowded it was. A close second was the declaration that they weren’t coming next year if it was going to be so crowded.

The conference implemented a scanning process where someone at the door of a session would scan your RootsTech badge. The scanning process utilized hand-held “smart” devices making it very slow. The person scanning had to hold the scanner, hold my badge, and then press the scan button. Rooms opened a half-hour before the start of a session meaning there was already a very long line which then moved very slowly into the session room.

Another scanning issue was that everyone had to leave a session room at the end of a session and be scanned back in if they were coming back to the same room. Since there was already a line, leaving meant being at the end of the line to get back in and in the case of very popular sessions, it would likely be full before one got to the front of the line. Then what to do? There might be other choices for sessions, but it was already time for the sessions to be underway. The only viable solution was to leave the previous session 15 minutes early to be near the front of the line for the next session in that room. Definitely not fair to the presenters.

I have a personal problem with the scanning. There was no advance notice that it would happen or any information about how the Conference was going to use this information. In my registration I had to supply a fair amount of contact information and I wasn’t comfortable with presenters knowing that I, Roland K Smith with an my email address attended their session … without being able to consent to how my personal information would be used.

Bottom Line

A great conference that has way outgrown it’s venue. Whether we go next year or not is pretty iffy. I learned a lot, but we weren’t able to get into four sessions during the week that filled up before we got to the front of the line. Any one of the four would have improved the value of the conference.

#RootsTech2018