The second and final day of the St. George Genealogy and Family Heritage Jamboree continued as smoothly as the first. I think the Saturday crowd was bigger than Friday's. Of course, that is no surprise. More people have time off on a Saturday than on a weekday. (I always wondered why so many genealogy events are held on weekdays when fewer people can attend.) I never heard the final attendance number, but it looked like 800 to maybe 1,000 people.
Again, a long list of presentations was delivered. You can find the full list at http://www.myancestorsfound.com/JamboreeSG/classes.htm.
I attended several presentations today. I especially enjoyed the talk given by Solveig Quass, who spoke on “Sharing Pictures and Scanned Images with a Wiki.” Solveig is the CEO of We Relate, a non-profit genealogy wiki. She used that wiki in her examples, for obvious reasons. A lot has changed at www.werelate.org since I last looked at it. I think I'll be writing about this interesting web site before long, describing many of the recent changes. You can take a look right now, however, at http://www.werelate.org.
One of my high points at the conference occurred in the closing minutes. A long list of door prizes was drawn at the very end of the conference. I had the pleasure of presenting a one-year subscription to Footnote, Inc. to prize winner Em Shipley. She had stopped by the Footnote, Inc. booth several times earlier and seemed to be very interested in this new online service. She obviously was delighted at winning this particular door prize.
I spent a lot of time in the Footnote, Inc., booth again today and was delighted to see that it was busy most all day. Apparently, a number of lecturers referred to Footnote.com in their presentations, and many people stopped by later for a personal demonstration of http://www.footnote.com.
Other vendors that I talked with in the Exhibitors Hall included the following:
Millennia Software was demonstrating Legacy Family Tree. While not a new product, it continues to have incremental improvements. The company was also talking about their upcoming cruise from Vancouver, British Columbia, to Hawaii. Details may be found at http://www.legacyfamilytree.com/CruiseInfo_2007.asp.
WorldVitalRecords.com was demonstrating the company's affiliated genealogy databases. The company launched its new service within the past year and is adding new information frequently. You can read my past articles about this online service here.
PedigreeSoft demonstrated its genealogy software, a program that keeps its database online. The program's operation is loosely similar to traditional genealogy programs with the exception that data is stored on a web site instead of on your hard drive. Your data is kept private, invisible to others, unless you specify otherwise. The company makes frequent backups of your data, giving a higher level of protection than other genealogy programs. I have written about this program before here.
Generation Maps is a printing service that provides all sorts of large format printouts of your data. Products include wall charts, various decorative charts, fine art reproductions of your family photographs, and more. Trying to describe this company's products in text is an impossible task. You can see pictures of some of their products at http://www.generationmaps.com.
The Washington County PAF Users Group had a charming display, including genealogy jokes and cartoons displayed on the wall in the back of the both. This small organization produces a newsletter that is widely read by subscribers who live far from Washington County, Utah. You can learn more at http://www.cgslink.com/learning/page3.html.
The Generations Network, better known as Ancestry.com, was in attendance with a big booth and several employees in attendance. This genealogy publishing powerhouse had many products on display, including online databases and printed books.
The Genealogy Shelf is a name that is not yet well known but sells a huge inventory of genealogy books, software, CDROM disks, and more. This retailer carries an impressive inventory and exhibits at many genealogy conferences.
The Gold Bug has been at exhibitors' halls of various genealogy conferences for years. The company is best known for AniMap, an excellent mapping program for genealogists. While that program hasn't changed for a while, the Gold Bug is adding numerous CD-ROM disks of historic map libraries. Details are available at http://www.cgslink.com/learning/page3.html.
Incline Software is known in the genealogy community for its Windows genealogy program, called Ancestral Quest. In fact, this program shares a common heritage with Personal Ancestral File (PAF) for Windows. The same company also produces PAFWiz, an add-on program for PAF. A brand-new version 2.0 of PAFWiz has just been released and brings much of the functionality of Ancestral Quest to PAF version 5. In other words, users of the aging Personal Ancestral File can now add many of the features of modern genealogy programs without having to switch to a new program. Version 2.0 now adds the capability to write to PAF databases (previous editions could only read PAF data, not write). I would suggest that PAF users keep an eye on PAFWiz 2.0 at http://www.ancquest.com/pafwiz/. I hope to write a review of this product in the not-too-distant future.
The above list plus the list published yesterday certainly is not a complete conference exhibitor list, but if does list most of those with whom I talked, especially those who have new products or services this year. I must say that it is a great time to be a genealogist; the wealth of tools and online sources of information give us powerful capabilities that were undreamed of by earlier generations of genealogists.
To the organizers of the St. George Genealogy and Family Heritage Jamboree, I must say “Thank you for hosting a great event. I know that I enjoyed it, and I know that a lot of other genealogists were also glad that they attended!”
