Genes Reunited Blog

On Friday 24th June three members of the Genes Reunited Team set off to York from London Kings Cross station. We were really looking forward to attending the Yorkshire Family History Fair for the first time. We arrived at York racecourse late afternoon and started setting up our stand. We were situated on the Mezzanine along with The National Archives and local county record offices. We had a fantastic view over the entire race course! Once we were all happy with the stand and had checked that all the computers were working we set off to explore York by night. We had a lovely walk through the city, down the Shambles, a beautiful medieval street and to the Minster, York’s Gothic Cathedral. The Minster was founded in 627 and apparently is one of the largest of its kind in Northern Europe. The full title of the Minster is, The Cathedral and Metropolitical Church of St Peter in York. At night it is completely lit up with spot lights making it look even more striking.

The next day we were up bright and early to make sure everything was ready. We got out our leaflets, competition cards, pencils and some tasty Werther’s Originals! We then encountered a major problem; the wifi in the building was not working! At first we thought it might be to do with our position on the top floor, so we checked to see if our laptops picked up the connection on the ground floor but no luck, we also found out no one else could connect to the wifi. To make matters worse the IT specialist for the racecourse wasn’t available on Saturday and we literally had a few minutes until the doors opened and still we had no internet! We were not to be defeated though, Katie (Product Manager) jumped into a Taxi and raced to the centre of York where she brought a 3G Data Card for our four laptops allowing us to connect to the internet, what a relief!

It was great to see our members again and hear their positive feedback as well as some really useful suggestions. Ryan (our designer) held one to one sessions with some of our members to get their opinions on the site. We didn’t just get feedback though, we met some people who had never used our site before and we happily showed them how it worked and many were excited at the prospect of not only searching our historical records but being able to search all trees on the site. We also spoke to people who had reached a brick wall with their family history and needed help with their challenges. One member had been searching for an ancestor for months only to find him and his family on the 1911 census, it was a great moment!

We really enjoyed the Yorkshire fair and we will definitely be back there next year (with our own internet connections!)