Jonathan Stayer was standing in front of a room of, oh, maybe 200 mostly middle-aged people.

"Just in case you thought this was going to be boring," he said, "I'm going to show you Lydia's Bottom."

He whipped out a transparency and slapped it on the overhead projector. Up on the screen popped a 1770 survey sketch of a tract of land along the Monongahela River in Washington County -- bottomland owned by Lydia Baldwin Guthrie.

Who says genealogy is boring? It wasn't to the almost 600 folks from 35 states who gathered Friday and Saturday at the Sheraton Station Square for the first Pennsylvania Genealogy Conference, where they learned about tax records and the septennial census and, from keynoter Rick Sebak, the native way -- not the dictionary way -- to pronounce "Monongahela," with a hay, not a he. About half the participants came from outside Western Pennsylvania.

In a session on warrants, surveys and patents, Mr. Stayer, head of the reference section of the Pennsylvania State Archives, illustrated the five documents for transferring land in Pennsylvania. He was one of 13 speakers who introduced family historians and professional genealogists to the basic and finer points of research in the 11th of America's 13 original colonies.

Conference sponsors were the state's two largest genealogy groups -- the Philadelphia-based Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania and Western Pennsylvania Genealogical Society, headquartered in Pittsburgh.

Terry Schaner came from her family's farm near Georgetown, Beaver County, for the conference because, after researching 10 family lines, she's found that "every question answered presents more questions." Her motto: "If one door doesn't open, go around and find another door and a window."

"There's always stuff to learn," said Charles Novak, who's been researching his family for about 25 years. A past president of the Virginia Genealogical Society, Mr. Novak, who lives in Herndon, Va., has roots in Fayette and Westmoreland counties. "You hear about repositories of records."

On Friday, Mr. Novak heard Penn State librarian Suzanne Kellerman talk about the university's Pennsylvania Newspaper Project, which identifies and preserves on microfilm newspaper collections throughout the state. Begun in 1983, it was reinvigorated over the past three years with $700,000 in National Endowment for the Humanities grants that will carry the program through 2008. The idea is to preserve the papers until funding for digitization can be found.

Already online is Penn State's Pennsylvania Civil War Newspapers project, a searchable site launched in November that provides access to 17 state newspapers published before, during and after the war, from 1847 to 1874.

In the bustling exhibit hall, about 20 vendors sold books, maps, T-shirts and "I collect ancestors" bumper stickers. Maybe the owner of the vehicle with the "KIN HNTR" vanity plate spotted in the parking garage sprang for one.