Thursday, April 10, 2014

RootsTech 2014 Keynote Speaker Judy Russell

Judy Russell is a lawyer and a certified genealogist. Her blog is called The Legal Genealogist. She teaches at several genealogy institutes and many conferences.

She was the first keynote speaker on Friday February 7, 2014. Her topic was something like Every Family Has a Story, What's Yours? She emphasized that pieces of oral family history can be lost in just three generations. It must be "purposely and accurately passed down from generation to generation." She used examples from her own family history.

I was so impressed with her presentation that I volunteered to give a lesson on this topic in our ward Relief Society on Tuesday March 4, 2014. I showed part of her presentation which was online at the RootsTech web site to the sisters and led a discussion about how to preserve our family history. Some of the sisters brought scrapbooks and journals and books that they had prepared and they told about them.
Judy Russell is very active in using and promoting DNA testing in genealogical research.

I really liked her story of how she discovered that her family was not descended from Alexander Baker of Massachusetts and how she broke the news at a family reunion. See The Cousin Who Isn't.

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