RootsTech Update and a Look Back on 2025

Good morning all. We are in the middle of a severe cold system here in Florida. It is getting down into the 20s and 30s at night and only in the 50s during the day. It's time to hunker down in the house and avoid going outside. I know you northerners think that is funny but we are cold! Since I won't be going out today, I figured I would try to get caught up on my blog a little.

Business has been good. OurAncestories Genealogy has picked up a couple new clients already this year and I have been preparing my presentations for RootsTech. As I mentioned previously, I will be presenting three talks during the conference. The schedule has been released and you can start looking over the classes you would like to attend either virtually or in person.

RootsTech

There will be about 500 classes in 14 languages offered during RootsTech. About half of those will be held in person in Salt Lake City and the rest will be available online for virtual attendees. Over seventy of the classes will be live streamed from the ballrooms and main stage. Additionally, there will be 4 to 5 live online webinars each class session. This means that online attendees can choose from 9 to 10 classes each class session from 8:00am-5:30pm Mountain Time. There will be 351 speakers covering a wide variety of topics suitable for all levels of genealogy enthusiasts. In person attendees will be able to choose from up to 19 presentations each class session. That is a lot of genealogy going on. But there is more. There will be over 100 exhibitors and many will have sponsored talks in the Expo Hall where you can sit in a small group and hear from the companies themselves. Imaging sitting with a group of 20 to 30 people listening to Crista Cowan talk about Ancestry or Daniel Horowitz talk about MyHeritage and being able to ask them questions directly or walking up and talking to the company representatives one-on-one. 

The emcee for the Main Stage will be Kirby Heyborne again. He has done a great job in the past. Additionally, there will be 11 global emcees presenting in a variety of languages including French, Spanish, and Japanese. In person keynote speakers will include Marlee Martin, Steve Young, and Tara Roberts. Virtual keynote speakers include astronaut Jose Hernandez, the Gardiner Brothers, Jessica Soho, and Brazilian footballer Zico.

Registration is currently $129 for all three days and the virtual registration is free. So register now if you haven't already done so. I hope to see you at RootsTech on March 5-7. Come up and say hi if you see me there.

Since we are a month into 2026, in addition to the update on RootsTech, I figured I would provide some statistics on how much the genealogy world has changed during 2025.

FamilySearch

During 2025 FamilySearch added 1.9 billion searchable names from historical records. Users connected 171 million new people and 466 million sources to the collaborative tree. Personally, I was able to add 1,350 people and 5,180 sources to the tree last year. This was actually one of my lowest years for contributions on FamilySearch. In addition to these great additions, the FamilySearch labs has released several products, not the least of which is the Full Text Search which uses AI to "read" documents and make them searchable much quicker than 

MyHeritage

MyHeritage introduced a treasure trove of new resources in 2025. They added 6.6 billion historical records which means they now have over 38 billion records for you to search. OldNews, their newspaper archive, now has over 400 million searchable newspaper pages from 25 countries. For DNA users, they increased the number of ethnicities from 42 to 79, added 40 DNA trait reports, and added full genome testing. MyHeritage now has over 9.6 million kits in their DNA database. LiveMemory was introduced at RootsTech. This product can produce short videos from you photographs. They also added audio recording and transcription to MyStories which helps people create stories of their lives based on weekly email prompts. you can read more about these and other MyHeritage updates on their blog.

These are just a few of the updates that we saw during 2025. Speakers at RootsTech will discuss some of these updates as well as give you a sneak peek at what we can expect to see during 2026. Keep up with the news and join me for the largest genealogy conference in the world on March 5-7. See you there.