Projectkin's Ride Along with Jennifer Jones » The World of RootsTech is Ready! 🚙 💨

Thank you to my guest today, Jennifer Jones, Kristin Rapinac, Bill Moore, Karen Hassell, DeeDee D, DearMYRTLE, Jane Chapman, Samran Masih, Becky Hetchler, Karen Pedersen Travis, Diane Burley, Lynda Heines, Kyla Bayang, Kathy Stone Deborah Carl, Linda Stufflebean, Lisa Rex, Kelli Cedarfield, Bill Butcher, Christine Clark, and so many more of you for joining us today.

I can’t tell you how much it means to us to see you join us from the cold of winter in Calgary, Canada, to the heat of summer in Wellington, New Zealand. Your thoughts, comments, and encouragement are the glue that holds this global community together. Were you there? Did I miss you? The chat isn’t captured, but your additions can be by dropping them into the comments below.

Projectkin programming is offered free with the kind support of our Patrons worldwide. Explore our story and join us 👇.

RootsTech is just a week away!

With this annual confab at the Salt Palace in Salt Lake City just about a week away, it was a pleasure to have my friend Jennifer Jones of Tracking Down the Family help me kick off my 10-day series of daily livestream events.

I’ll keep these notes short each day, focusing on what’s ahead on our Projectkin events calendar and tipping you off to updates I know about on the RideAlongPartners.org page.

In case ya missed it…

In my own Projectkin publication, we had an extraordinary program on Tuesday when Rhonda Lauritzen joined me to talk about “The Hard Stuff.”

This was a fabulous presentation that can be inspiring in helping you think through those moments of family stress that can create page-turners in your family story, but also break hearts at their most vulnerable. Even if you were there, you might appreciate the chance to linger over the recording. You’ll find it in our Specials section, filed alongside Projectkin’s other programs with Rhonda Lauritzen.

Later today… It’s Kathy’s Corner!

Even as all this RootsTech excitement is underway, we have a special program in our Pacific-friendly timeslot today with Kathy Stone of Kathy's Coaching. Following up on our conversations about postcards last month and December’s holiday event, we’ll take a dive today into how to handle and preserve the most vulnerable paper records and ephemera in our collections. You wouldn’t want those fun souvenir postcards to damage your treasured old photographs, right? Let’s see how.

Ride Along Ready! 🚙💨

From the start, Geneabloggers and Projectkin have shared a passion for family history and storytelling since the beginning. We both see the extraordinary value of pursuing this work with the support and encouragement of a community. So, with RootsTech approaching, it only made sense to do this together.

The nascent “Ride Along” idea we’d started last year has leveled up by doing this as a partnership, and that’s what you’ll see on-site and online now with RideAlongPartners.org, and everyone is welcome. All we ask is that you join us with an open heart and an ethos of support and encouragement as you participate in this global conference.

DearMYRTLE of Geneabloggers, and I designed the special-purpose site to help everyone find each other during the conference and share the joy. The site is organized to focus your attention on:

* Livestreamed events dates, times & links. This includes those we’re hosting as well as any of yours about the conference. Really!

* Posts about the conference. I’m scouring sites for these, send them my way if you’ve been writing about the conference! This will include photos and recordings for those of you onsite and… (why not) watching from home!

* Recordings of our events: A quick way to find events hosted on Substack, YouTube, or

* For those of you on-site, some tips for finding our Ride Along Partners booth in the Society Hall — AND a special in-person lunch gathering for early-birds on Tuesday!

* SWAG! “I was there,” fun! This is a special event, so we decided to commemorate it in a fun, practical, and cost-effective way that combines

* Buy your own professionally made bags, tees, and mugs with

* Make your own, DIY tags for those blogger beads, bookmarks and… other ideas?

* Coming: A Relatives at RootsTech page to capture tips on making the most of the special occasion service from FamilySearch.org. You’ll find me at Projectkin.org/relatives.

Let’s make the most of all of this. It will certainly be memorable! 👋

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