24 April 2017

Alberta Genealogical Society Conference: Day 2

It was a shock to open the bedroom curtains in the hotel in Edmonton to this sight on Sunday. This doesn't happen in Ottawa on St George's Day which is also Shakespeare's birthday. I obviously could not start my first presentation with the quote "Now is our winter of discontent made glorious summer ..."

With three presentations to give my perspective on the conference was limited. I enjoyed giving all the presentations on London Burials, British WW2 Child Evacuees to Canada and British Newspapers.

I did manage to attend the opening plenary by Kyle Betit on his experience with WDYTYA, the US TV program. ProGenealogists, the part of Ancestry in which he is involved, spends an average of 600 hours researching each episode, starting with building a family tree back 4 generations. These days the celebrities (or their agents) come of WDYTYA to be involved whereas for the first few series they had to be solicited.

Along the way Kyle mentioned that AncestryDNA now has 4 million tests completed, up from 3 million in January.

Thank's to the Alberta Genealogical Society for allowing me to be part of their event.

1 comment:

Gail Roger said...

This doesn't happen in Ottawa on St George's Day which is also Shakespeare's birthday.
Surely you jest! It happened exactly like that in 2003. I have reason to remember it because my elder daughter shares her birthday with William Shakespeare, and I was volunteering on an expedition to the Experimental Farms with my younger daughter's class that day! Brrrrrr. (At least we had the Agricultural Museum to ourselves!) Safe journey home!