It was an unexpected religious experience.

It may of been a short month but it was certainly a long week and appreciated its conclusion. Saturday was my 4th annual pilgrimage to Rootstech. If you are interested at all about genealogy and or DNA, Salt Lake City is the place to be this week. I only attend one day of the four day event and truthfully one day is plenty if you plan well. If your perception of genealogy is watching Henry Louis Gates Jr. on “Finding your Roots” you will be shocked by the lack of diversity here. My unscientific tally is a ratio of 100-1. 1 being any minority and 100 being causation. The show does promote all ethnicities but they seem to stay away-at least on Saturday.

It is also deeply rooted in the LDS religion which is to be expected-the show is in Utah and one of the faiths tenants is finding ancestors and baptizing them, so genealogy is important. Knowing this I was still a little taken aback though at the conclusion of the first presentation I attended Saturday morning. It was conducted by Family Search, the Genealogical arm of the LDS church and designed to review new updates to the site. It was a large audience and the speaker did a decent job conveying these enhancements to the site. The ending was very strange though; at the conclusion of her talk she closed like she was finishing a prayer even ending with “Amen.” It was funny how many people in the crowd responded with “Amen”-maybe it was a church meeting and I missed the memo…

I do look forward to this day because it has opened so many doors for me in my continuing search for family. I have built a decent sized “Tree” with the info I have found and this trip provides a great dose of inspiration to continue. It is a very tech-savvy group that conducts this and they offer a myriad of options to keep up with all the activities. One of those options is the ability to see how many “relatives” you have at the program and are in the same building. It also shows your relation to them, breaking it down to paterntal and maternal. At its highest number I showed 1,067 “family” in the building. Of course most were 7th, 8th and 9th generations back but the most interesting part is when I checked which side of the family they were from. Of 1,067 hits, 1,066 were on my fathers side, which meant only 1 was from my mothers side. I find this fascinating because 2 years ago I didn’t even know who my father was. I love DNA.