ROOTS & BRANCHES

I hope your “Roots & Branches” columnist is going to be forgiven if he indulges in a little humblebrag.

And, yes, it’ll probably be a lot more brag than it is humble.

The just completed all-virtual International German Genealogy Partnership wasn’t perfect, but it was darn close.

And, yes, your “Roots & Branches” columnist had the honor of co-chairing it.

The Partnership, still a relatively young organization that is a collection of groups from around the world that focus on aspects of German genealogy, had previously sponsored well-received in-person conferences in Minneapolis, MN, and Sacramento, CA, the former in 2017 and the latter in 2019.

A third such get-together was scheduled for Cincinnati, OH, for this year but ran into the buzzsaw of the COVID-19 pandemic and was cancelled.

But rising from the ashes of that cancellation, the Partnership agreed to sponsor a virtual event with the same theme (“Researching Together Worldwide / Weltweit Gemeinsam Forschen”) developed by the original local sponsor, the Hamilton County Genealogical Society, and using the responses from its call for papers as the nucleus of its program.

What resulted was an eight-day conference that lasted from July 17 to 24 and included many activities that turned it into the first genealogy conference to successfully mimick all aspects of an in-person event.

That’s because there weren’t just prerecorded presentations … there were also live question-and-answer sessions with presenters.

There wasn’t just a virtual exhibit hall sitting there unvisited … contests were created to spur interaction with sponsors and exhibitors, who reported seeing many more eyeballs than previous virtual genealogy conferences.

And there wasn’t just “downtime” in which attendees dropped off from the virtual event platform … there were Connections sessions (basically Zoom breakouts centered on various affinities relating to German geography, culture and affinity) and no less than three virtual happy hours in which registrants had the opportunity to randomly network.

More than 800 people attended the conference, on par with the previous in-person gatherings, but freed from the costs of travel, many more Germans participated, including some who staffed a translation room that was extremely popular.

The conference’s Gold sponsors, MyHeritage and FamilySearch, each sponsored special activities. In the case of FamilySearch, they brought in experts from their Family History Library to do free online consultations for the registrants, and many attendees took advantage of that offering.

Frequent “Roots & Branches” correspondent Eric “Rick” Bender from New Mexico was one of the well-satisfied attendees. “Virtual vs. in-person? For me, it’s mostly the difference in cost—I didn’t need to fly, book a hotel room or rent a car,” he wrote after the conference. “Which is especially meaningful to me since I have reached the point in my quest where I already know most of what is being taught; so, I’m not looking for the how-tos of genealogy, I’m looking into a few specific things—I have some nagging questions whose answers remain well-hidden.”