RootsTech 2025 - 3 days ago

Over the past 3 days, RootsTech took place in Salt Lake City. RootsTech is the largest annual genealogy conference in the world, with tens of thousands of in person attendees and several million online attendees.

I went to RootsTech in person three times, in 2012, 2014 and 2017.

In 2018. RootsTech started live streaming some of their talks. In 2021 due to Covid, the Conference was completely online. They resumed the in-person conference a couple of years ago, but with millions of viewers online during the Covid years, they smartly decided to continue streaming many of the talks.

If you went to the RootsTech website this year between March 6 and 8, you would have seen the list of 418 sessions. 254 of those were in person, 244 were available online. And 80 of the in person sessions were also available online and live. With so many sessions available online, it made for quite a selection of talks to choose from.

Attending Online

Of course by not attending in person, you will not be able to spend time with all your friends you made at previous conferences or make new friends. But if you couldn’t go, then the online experience is the next best thing.

There are a lot of sessions broadcast live, including the keynote sessions.

When attending online, you can browse through the list of sessions and decide which ones you want to “attend”. You can watch the live sessions when they are broadcast, or watch them any time afterwards. If you watch them live, you can join the live chat with other viewers. Most sessions also have a syllabus that you can download. 

Choosing Your Sessions

It’s really up to you to choose the sessions that interest you the most or have speakers you enjoy listening to. Most of the sessions are an hour each, and the live ones end with about 10 minutes of Q&A from the live audience.

Over the past few years and this year as well, I’ve picked about a dozen of the sessions of most interest to me. This included some of the keynotes as well as some of my favorite speakers such as Adina Newman (DNA and Endogamy), Steve Little (Artificial Intelligence) and CeCe Moore (Ethical Standards and Investigative Genealogy). Watching about 5 hours on Thursday, 5 on Friday and 2 on Saturday was enough to exhaust me as if I was there in person.

I very much enjoyed and was most impressed and surprised by CeCe Moore’s presentation:

She wonderfully explains her involvement for the past 11 years and gives a behind-the-scenes description of the PBS genealogy show Find Your Roots hosted by Dr. Henry Gates. But then to my surprise, she tells of how they turned the tables and did research with Dr. Gates as the subject. It included a sneak preview of the episode that is to be broadcast on April 8 where CeCe sits in the presenter’s chair. I can’t wait to see the full episode.

Session Archives

Don’t feel you can only watch the RootsTech sessions during the few days when the RootsTech Conference is taking place each year. RootsTech keeps an online archive of most of the sessions back to 2019 and these can be watched any time. There are more than 1500 sessions and 3000 other recordings in their catalog to watch.