I was also pleased to see several hundred high school and junior high school students at GENTECH 2001 on Friday. I’m not used to seeing teenagers at genealogy conferences, and it was nice to see such interest among the younger crowd.

The conference was held at the Hampton Inn Suites and Convention Center, a brand-new facility that was just perfect for this event. I was pleased to find a high-speed Ethernet connection in my hotel room. Any guest who carried a laptop with an Ethernet card could surf the net and check e-mail at high speed without even tapping into the telephone. In addition, any guest who did not bring a laptop could use the in-room television sets that featured high-speed Internet access; there was a wireless keyboard in each room. This service apparently worked a bit like WebTV although a different company provided the service. You could even lie in bed and surf the Web or check e-mail.

Friday evening’s banquet featured awards and speeches. The annual GENTECH Scholarship was awarded to Mary D Taffet. Mary’s proposal centers on her doctoral thesis project and involves using natural language processing to search for names in huge databases. I cannot describe her project any more than that, I’m afraid. Mary described it at some length, but it is in a field that I am not familiar with, and I couldn’t keep up! She has promised to supply a short description of her project in the near future, written in words that even I can understand.

Last year’s GENTECH Scholar winner, Kevira Mertha, was present at this year’s conference and presented an update on her project.

The New England Historic Genealogical Society presented their Technology Excellence 2000 Award at the same banquet. This year’s winner was the Illinois Genealogical Society’s online databases.

The Friday evening banquet also featured a talk by Dick Pence, one of the early pioneers of genealogy technology. Dick Pence’s speech was entitled, "The Computer and I." This was an encore performance for Dick as he was the keynote speaker at GENTECH a few years ago. Dick commented on the history and the present state of technology as applied to genealogy. As always, Dick was in fine form. He is a good speaker with lots of humorous stories. I don’t think I ever heard so many North Dakota jokes! (I should point out that Dick Pence was born and raised in South Dakota, where the chief form of entertainment seems to be poking fun at their northern neighbors.)

A number of new products or services were announced at this year's GENTECH conference. Parentéle was shown for the first time at a North American genealogy conference. This is the Windows genealogy program that I reviewed in last week’s newsletter. It seemed to generate quite a bit of interest, as the Parentéle booth always seemed to be busy during the conference.

Bob Velke and his crew were busy showing off the new Family Tree SuperTools, and I will write about that new program in a separate article this week.

ProQuest is a new service that that caught my eye. I should mention that the person demonstrating ProQuest was Andrea Eastman-Mullins. She and I spent some time searching for mutual Eastman ancestors on ProQuest’s online database. ProQuest is a service run by Bell and Howell and formerly known as University Microfilms Incorporated (UMI). The company is building a huge online database of genealogy monographs and books, local history books, maps, atlases, public records of all sorts, church records, school records, tax rolls, cemetery lists, wills, military rosters and more. These documents have been available on microfilm for many years. Now ProQuest is converting this huge microfilm archive to digital format.

ProQuest is also putting the Sanborn Maps online. These maps were created by the Sanborn Map Company from 1867 until well into the 20th century and are very detailed, showing building outlines, shapes, construction materials, height, use, windows, and even sidewalk widths. These can be helpful to genealogists since they frequently show your ancestors' neighbors and neighborhoods. Such information can be valuable as people in those days often lived near their relatives and walked to work.

ProQuest is a commercial service aimed at library usage more than as a service for individuals. A few months from now, you will be able to access it by visiting a library near you. Both of the ProQuest databases are in beta stage right now with data being added daily. I hope to get some "hands on" time soon and write about these databases in a future newsletter.

GeoDiscovery was at GENTECH 2001 demonstrating their new Geode: a small GPS receiver that plugs into a Handspring Visor handheld computer. The combination of the Visor and the Geode results in a very intelligent mapping tool. The applications displayed at GENTECH 2001 were not genealogy-specific, but did show a lot of promise. The company obviously is first focusing on popular applications, such as finding restaurants, highways, or airports. However, once this device matures a bit, I suspect that other applications will appear, whether written by GeoDiscovery or by third parties.

Search & ReSearch Publishing Corporation was at GENTECH 2001, showing off a brand-new CD-ROM: "Massachusetts Statewide Consolidated Index of Surnames." This company has been publishing the early vital records of many Massachusetts towns; the new CD-ROM is an index of those records. It also contains a bibliography and a number of maps.

Millennia Software was showing off their new Legacy 3.0 Deluxe Edition. You may recall that Legacy 3.0 was a commercial program that recently was converted to a free program. Millennia Software renamed it slightly, adding the words "Standard Edition," but they didn’t make any changes to the program itself. The free program is identical to the previous commercial one. Then Millennia Software also announced a new Legacy 3.0 Deluxe Edition that sells for $24.95. I discussed this new marketing plan with the Millennia Software owners at GENTECH 2001; their marketing plan now is based upon the idea of giving away a very powerful and user-friendly genealogy program and then selling upgrades and enhanced features for a modest cost. They believe that Legacy 3.0 Standard Edition will gain many new "customers," if I can use that term in conjunction with a free product. Once these new users learn to appreciate the program, many of them will want to upgrade to additional features available only in the Deluxe Edition. Will that marketing plan work? I have no idea, but it certainly does remind me of the Gillette Corporation’s marketing plan of many years ago: Gillette gave away free razors and then made many millions of dollars selling replacement razor blades. I hope that Millennia Software has similar success.

While not new, the BYU Molecular Genealogy Research Group’s booth always seemed busy. They were publicizing their work and taking blood samples for their research. Each participant supplied a four-generation pedigree chart and blood sample. The BYU project links individuals together in "family trees," based on the unique identification of genetic markers.

My personal GENTECH 2001 highlight occurred on Saturday evening, after the conference ended. It has been a tradition for more than a decade for an informal group to get together for dinner on Saturday evening after genealogy conventions. We have done this after most of the GENTECH conferences as well as those of the National Genealogical Society and the Federation of Genealogy Societies. Attendance has varied over the years, as low as ten people or as high as 50. These dinners are very informal with only one rule: there are no rules. This year we estimated that 20 people would show up and made a reservation at a nearby steakhouse for 20 people. However, on Saturday afternoon the list of attendees signing up grew rapidly. I walked into a very crowded restaurant on Saturday evening and asked for a table for 32. The maitre’d reminded me that earlier that day I had made a reservation for 20! After a bit of conversation, The Salt Grass Restaurant staff gallantly found three adjacent tables and 32 chairs. I was amazed that they could do this when there was a 90-minute waiting list!

Thirty-two exhausted genealogists dove into a variety of steak, shrimp, chicken, jalapeno peppers, and beverages. We certainly were a noisy group! I never knew that genealogists could be so raucous. Oh yes, the food was excellent.

I hope that someone at the Salt Grass Restaurant reads this newsletter and passes it on to the other employees. I want to thank them for their excellent example of Texas hospitality.

All in all, I would rate GENTECH 2001 as a success. The GENTECH folks are to be congratulated for this year’s conference.

GENTECH 2002 will be held in Boston, Massachusetts with the New England Historic Genealogical Society as co-host. 2002 will be the tenth anniversary of the GENTECH conferences, and conference chairman Sandy Hewlett plans to make it the best one yet. One new thing at GENTECH 2002 will be one track dedicated to genetics. GENTECH stands for "Genealogy Technology," which is not limited to computers. In this case, "technology" will include genetics and DNA studies.

The GENTECH 2002 conference location is almost in my backyard at the Hynes Center in Boston, one of the best convention centers in the world. It is connected by indoor walkways to the host hotel plus several other hotels, many restaurants and stores. While GENTECH 2002 will take place in January, even a Boston blizzard will not slow the conference attendees. They will be able to walk from the conference halls to their hotels and to numerous restaurants in shirtsleeve comfort, never stepping outdoors.

Anyone on the East coast thinking of traveling to GENTECH 2002 might also be interested in Amtrak's new Acela service, which now operates between Washington, DC and Boston. This high-speed train often is faster than the airlines when considering portal-to-portal times.

Based upon the success of this year’s GENTECH conference and those of previous years, I bet the 2002 event will also be a good one. Now, does anyone want to go to dinner after the GENTECH 2002 conference?