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Nick Vujicic, a world renowned motivational speaker from Australia who has no arms or legs, speaks to a filled Tabernacle audience at Temple Square in Salt Lake City on Sept. 13, 2009. Vujicic is one of 13 keynote speakers at this year’s RootsTech Connect on Feb. 25-27, 2021.
Scott G Winterton, Deseret News
Discussing Nick Vujicic’s family history could whisk a person off to any number of countries and cultures.
Vujicic’s parents are both from Serbia. Although he was born in Australia, many of his traits, values and priorities stem from his upbringing in a Serbian household. His wife is of Japanese and Mexican descent. He’s lived in California, traveled the world as a motivational speaker and bestselling author, and now resides in the Dallas area.
RootsTech Connect 2021 - The Website Unveiled (On Video)
As a RootsTech Connect 2021 Ambassador I was privileged to participate in a Zoom discussion today with FamilySearch/Rootstech leaders and about 75 other Ambassadors. The RootsTech leaders - Steve Rockwell, Paul Nauta and Jen Allen - walked us through the plans for the RootsTech Connect 2021 Conference to be held Live on 25 to 27 February 2021, and especially how the https://rootstech.org website will be used. They said the website would be LIVE on Wednesday, 24 February.
The FamilySearch YouTube channel has the next Road to RootsTech video which shows the upcoming RootsTech website:
We received a lot more information from the meeting, and a lot of it is in the video above. Some of my notes are:
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Scott G Winterton, Deseret News
Organizers of this year’s RootsTech Connect believe having a free, virtual event during the COVID-19 pandemic will be a “game changer” of epic proportions.
With the world’s largest family history conference less than a week away, Feb. 25-27, more than 315,000 participants from more than 200 countries and territories worldwide have registered with nearly 90% of those participating for the first time.
That’s a dramatic increase from previous years in the Salt Palace Convention Center, with about 30,000 attending in person and an average of 100,000 online viewers, according to Jen Allen, one of RootsTech Connect’s director of events at FamilySearch and one of the event’s main organizers.
Here are the highlights of my family history and genealogy related activities over the past week:
1) Moderated the Chula Vista Genealogical Society Research Group Meeting on Wednesday on Zoom with 28 attendees (iincluding 6 guests). In the first hour, I shared about RootsTech, the new MyHeritage features, FamilySearch 2020 highlights, Ancestry management changes, the NGS 2021 conference, my second FOREVER box (even showed one home movie), and discussed the Genelaogical Proof Standard and Evidence Analysis Process Map. In the second hour, attendees asked questions and shaed their research successes and challenges.
2) Attended the San Diego Genealogical Society monthly program meeting, which featured Thomas MacEntee on Coded Census: Deciphering U.S. Census Codes and Getting Ready For the 1950 Census.