Every Sunday night since 2016, my dad and I get on FaceTime and dig into our AncestryDNA match list together. Nine-thirty to two in the morning, sometimes later. My mom eavesdrops in the background. We've only missed five Sundays in all those years.

It is, hands down, my favorite time of the week.

And I've spent a long time trying to figure out why. It's not really about the matches. It's about doing the work with someone. Having a person right there when the record loads and the name is finally right. Someone who gets exactly why you just gasped at a census page or an obituary.

Most genealogists don't have that. Most genealogists do this work completely alone, at a kitchen table or on their living room couch, at eleven at night, and when they finally find the thing they've been chasing for six years, they look up and there's nobody to tell. Or there's somebody, and that somebody says, "Oh. Nice," when they’re really not paying attention.

That's the whole reason I said yes when my friend Diahan Southard (the DNA expert I trust more than anyone) came to me with an idea.

The Idea

In one of our regular brainstorming sessions (you know, like the one where we came up with The Search Party™), Diahan said that she wanted to gather people. And that was the magic word for me because it is, after all, my word of the year for 2026.  I love GATHERING!

Diahan said she wanted to put on an event where it wasn’t the two of us on stage lecturing (again!) but where people could actually DO GENEALOGY! So, we started talking about what that might look like and the more we talked, the more excited we got.  What if people didn’t just work on their own family history, together. What if we all really worked on it TOGETHER. Actually sit down, side by side, and work real cases together.

We're calling it Genealogy CoLab™,
and it is not another family history conference.

You know those conferences. You sit in an uncomfortable chair for hours. You take notes on seventeen fascinating things you fully intend to try when you get home. And then life happens, the notebook closes, and six months later you can't remember which session that one brilliant idea came from.

CoLab is the opposite of that. You bring your laptop. You bring a real, unsolved family history question. And you bring what you already know. Because at this table, you're not just the researcher. You're somebody else's research partner too.

How It Actually Works

Picture a table of six people. Six real family history problems. One of them is yours. The other five are not.

All six of them move forward because you cannot spend two days elbow-deep in five other people's brick walls without something sparking loose in your own. You'll watch someone open a record collection you've never heard of. You'll see a strategy that would never have occurred to you for your family, and realize it's exactly the thing yours has been waiting for.

Twice a day, we take a pause for something we call Ask the Room. A table hits a wall, the question goes out to everyone. Does anybody read German script? Has anyone worked Jefferson County, Missouri? And somewhere in that room, a hand goes up. The person who spent eleven years in exactly those records pulls up a chair.

And on the last afternoon, nobody leaves with a to-do list. There's a work sprint where you actually take your highest-priority next step, right there, in a room full of people who can help the second you hit something. You go home having made real progress.

Diahan and I will be in the room the entire two days. Not on a stage. At your table. At the next table. Sitting down with you if you want our eyes on your specific case. We'll also each bring the AI research coaches we've built out of our own genealogy frameworks, for the moments a table gets truly stuck and needs one more angle. But the people in the room are still the whole point. AI can suggest. Researchers investigate. Evidence decides.

"But I'm Not Experienced Enough"

If that thought just crossed your mind, I want to stop you right there, because it crossed almost everyone's mind who filled out our interest form too.

Here's what I've learned after decades of doing this work: the rooms where the best discoveries happen are never the rooms full of experts. They're the rooms with variety. The three-year researcher asks the question the thirty-year veteran stopped asking a decade ago. Someone who's never touched your record set says "wait, why do you think that?" And that’s the moment the case cracks wide open.

You don't need to be the most experienced person at your table. You need to be curious, generous, and willing to spend real attention on somebody else's problem. That's the bar for being admitted to the room.

The Founding Room

This is our very first Genealogy CoLab, and it's happening close to (our) home:

November 13–14, 2026
Sandy, Utah
Founding Room price: $500

We started an “interested” list a couple of weeks ago and more than a hundred people already raised their hands before we ever asked for a dime. (And there are not a hundred chairs in the room.) Now that we’ve officially opened registration, seats are going fast. Registration closes September 29th, or whenever the room fills, whichever comes first.

I don't say that to rush you. I say it because I'd rather you know now than find out on the 30th that you waited too long and missed it.

If any part of you has been quietly craving a room full of people whose eyes don't glaze over when you say "cemetery record" or a table of people who will sit with you inside your hardest family history research question and mean it — this is that room.

Claim your seat now!

I can't wait to see who ends up at these tables in this room.