Genes News

Last night a few members of the Genes Reunited Team headed over to Olympia for the set up of our stand for Who Do You Think You Are? Live.  WDYTYA is the biggest family history event in the world! As it’s so large, it takes months of work to design, create and organise the event, we started planning in October 2012, so it’s a fantastic feeling to finally see it all come together.

We have recently introduced the Keepsafe to Genes Reunited which we are really proud of, so when designing the stand we wanted that to be one of the main focuses.  We used the Keepsafe of one of our team members Estelle, we enlarged her family photos and documents and dotted instructions and tips around it on the back wall.  It’s difficult to imagine just how big these images will look when they are off a computer screen and on the stand wall, but seeing the result last night was really great, the images are very eye-catching.  We’ll be adding photos to our facebook page throughout today.

Last year we put up a missing persons wall where we encouraged people to fill in a form detailing the ancestors they are trying to uncover.  This worked really well so again this year we have a framed cork board for people to pin up their missing people.  Last night we cut the board down to size and mounted it in an old style frame.  To accompany this we’ve set up a dedicated WDYTYA board on Genes Reunited.  At the event we will put requests onto the board and we’ve asked our dedicated members to offer their invaluable advice and tips.  The laptop at the event is linked up to a plasma screen so we tested this was all working and shipshape.

It’s always very nerve racking arriving at the stand Thursday night in case there is something wrong with the graphics or the equipment.  However, everything went very smoothly! We have four pods with 8 computers for people at the event to use so we made sure they were connected to the internet and set up with free access to Genes Reunited.  This year we have a scanning machine to scan and upload people’s documents straight to their personal Keepsafe, so we made sure we tested it.

We took a tour around the rest of the hall to see how everyone was getting on with building their stands; it’s really great to see so many familiar faces from other family history events.

We left late Thursday night happy that everything was in place and we were ready to greet members and family history enthusiasts as soon as the doors opened at 10am Friday!

If you are heading to the event this weekend we are at stand 631 and we’ll be there Friday, Saturday and Sunday.