RootsTech 2025: World’s Largest Family History Event Wrap-up

RootsTech 2025: World’s Largest Family History Event Wrap-up

If you don’t know what RootsTech is, it’s the largest family history and genealogy event, around the world, of the year, celebrating family!

RootsTech has certainly done it again! That was a fantastic, fun-filled 3 days! They seem to top themselves each year!

The RootsTech 2025 event, hosted by FamilySearch, has finally come to an end, but the learning has not. Did you know that you can still access RootsTech? Not only can you access almost everything in your playlist for 3 years, the sessions/classes, keynotes, and Expo Hall (just not the deals), but they are keeping your chats available (to copy down your info) for the year, and you can still access RootsTech Relatives for the rest of the month! So, if you want to view any of the more than 1,500+ RootsTech Sessions (most of the 412+ in-person and online sessions for 2025 and most of the other sessions from the past 3 years), Keynote Speakers or the Expo Hall, they are all still available, and will continue to be available! 

RootsTech: The Event of the Year, Once Again

RootsTech began in 2011, in-person, in Salt Lake City, and for their 10th anniversary, had to get creative, due to Covid. RootsTech 2021 was such a hit going virtual and FREE three years ago, due to Covid, that they went from about 30,000 attendees the year before to over 1,000,000! It was so amazing that they decided to do it again for 2022, and once again broke their record to 3,000,000! Then, they really outdid themselves by going hybrid two years ago, keeping the virtual platform, they designed just to use with the 2021 pandemic event that reached the entire world, and combining it smoothly with an in-person event for those missing the in-person experience, in which they had over 4,000,000 attendees worldwide from 240 countries and territories! This year, hybrid as well, was no exception and was once again the most fantastic global, family discovery event of the year, genealogy or otherwise!

My ​RootsTech 2025 Faves

Although I joined virtually and missed out on just a few in-person only sessions and aspects like MyHeritage's featured session and joining up with groups that I'm a part of, I had a great time! I absolutely loved everything about RootsTech, from ALL of the keynote speakers, the sessions, the new RootsTech theme song, “Who I Am” and featured video, the Relatives at RootsTech, the Expo Hall, to the chat and more, all of it was fantastic! All the keynote speakers were amazing, but my absolute faves this year were designer and artist, Dana Tanamachi’s inspiring and emotional personal family history story and journey; activist, author, and missionary to youngsters to preserve their family history and stories, Ndaba Mandela’s powerful and meaningful message; and singer, song writer and YouTube content creator Ysabelle Cuevas’ inspiring personal family history story, that hit home, and her version of the theme song! My other absolute faves at RootsTech were the Innovation and Tech Forum and FamilySearch Global and Tech Forum, as always; the Impact Forum, especially photographer Mylo Fowler’s powerful and inspiring story and message; the beautiful rendition of the theme song that was song by both Tanner Towsend (who did the original) and Ysabelle Cuevas! I joined many classes and have to say my faves this year were the very well organized, clear, concise, thorough, and excellent speakers and their topics, Mindy Taylor and her topic “ Analyzing Evidence: A Research Game Changer”;  David Allen Lambert and his topic “ Getting Started in Scottish Research” that covered information fill for ALL levels and Alice Childs and her topic “ Extracting Evidence: Strategies for Analyzing Genealogical Sources!

RootsTech 2025 at a Glance

Attendees:

• ​2020: 30, 000 in-person attendees (first online experience)
• 2021: 1,000,000+ virtual attendees
• 2022: 3,000,000 virtual attendees
• 2023: 4,000,000 virtual and in-person attendees
• 2024: Well over 16,000 people in-person and close to 4,000,000 people online from over 230 countries and territories around the world!
• 2025: I’m sure a higher expected amount than previous years!

Main Stage:

• Opening Address
• Keynotes Speakers
• Theme Song (video and live)
• Sponsor Highlights
• RootsTech Innovation and Tech Forum 2025
• FamilySearch Global and Tech Forum 2025
• The Impact Forum 2025
• Family Discovery Day
• Featured Sessions
• Live Views 
• Emcees (including 10 global emcees!) 
• And more!

​Expo Hall:

• FamilySearch
• Ancestry (I locked in a ½ off deal!)
• MyHeritage
• Storied
• Find My Past
• FamilyTree DNA
• 23andMe
• Mylio Photos
• Family Tree Maker
• Goodline
• RootsMagic
• The Family History Guide
• GenealogyBank
• GEDmatch
• Forever
• ​And many more I still need to check out!

​​Sessions:

• ~412 in-person and online​​​​​

Relatives at RootsTech 2025:

Out of over 460, 000 participants of Relatives at RootsTech...

I had over 30,000 relatives at RootsTech this year! 

New 2025 Innovations and Tech I Got to Learn About

• Adobe: How Lightroom, Adobe Express, and Photoshop can be used to enhance your family history by organizing, enhancing, restoring your family history photographs, along with using their newest, powerful, AI-generated tool to authentically generate lost features and more!
• Ancestry: They just announced their new photo tagging feature, that can recognize faces and can group all your uploaded photos; Image Transcript feature (in BETA), that can take journals, diaries, and letters that are uploaded to your tree (other documents coming soon) and transcribe them automatically with AI; and Networks feature (in BETA for Pro Tools users), that can group people together by community, records, etc. and add them to your ancestor’s network to go beyond your relatives!
• MyHeritage: They just announced their new feature/ tool, Cousin Finder, that helps you find your DNA matches without a DNA test so you can collaborate with them! They also announced their recently released Ancient Origins, that traces your origins up to 10,000 years and shows you your ancient populations, and updated ethnicity model that helps pinpoint your geographic regions even more!
• FamilySearch: New experiments in the FamilySearch Lab using Generative AI, such as their new AI Research Assistant, where you can discover new insights and possibly new ancestors in a way that has never been possible before. It even scans the web for info! Last year’s announced Full-Text Search has tons of records available from around the world now! Last year’s Together feature, just in the Lab, has now been officially released! Also, they have added new tools for tree integrity experiment in the Lab such as Guided Merge and an updated, clearer change log.
• record search and finding help, “Family Group Trees”, the new “Together” app, and family tree “Profile Quality Score”
• Storied: I heard about Storied two years ago at RootsTech, a platform dedicated to sharing and preserving your family history, where you can build family trees with historical records and bring them to life with vibrant, collaborative ancestor stories using Generative AI, while also integrating with FamilySearch. This year, they just announced their new Storied Assistant makes it easier to preserve your family history, memories, and recipes into a sharable story, even by just using your voice for to do it all.
• Soar.com: This company uses AI in “uplifting ways across all areas of life”. It includes such tools and features as Family Scribe that transforms, transcribes, translates, and more, uploaded videos, interviews, recordings, etc. into a book. It then adds pages of context, like importing genealogical research, insights, etc.  
• Remento: Preserves your family history with life story books that write themselves using AI-powered speech-to-text that transform recorded reflections into a book of beautifully written stories that include photos, stories, and voice recordings.

I saw as much of the main stage as possible and joined quite a few classes, and I’m so glad that I can save the rest to my playlist for later; of course, there was no way to get in everything in just 3 short days! 😉

​​It was such a big hit once again that they’ll being going hybrid again next year! See you on March 5th of 2025!

Don't forget to discover your past and those that came before, by including family, friends, strangers, communities, and the world! Discover those that have made the biggest impact on you, your stories, memories, traditions, and more, and preserve those memories for future generations so they can learn from our experiences! Discover how you can share your family history discoveries, knowledge, and resources to help others discover those that came before and who had the greatest impact on their lives! Discover you, discover connection, discover something new about your story and connect with it in a deeper way!
 
If you missed the RootsTech 2025 event, you can still sign up for FREE online and view all the classes for FREE, at RootsTech!
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Don’t have an account? You can create your FREE FamilySearch account at FamilySearch!