March 2025

RootsTech 2025 will offer a mix of in-person and virtual classes, interactive activities, and entertainment designed to inspire and educate family history enthusiasts of all levels. Whether you are a seasoned genealogist or just beginning your family discovery journey, RootsTech 2025 offers something for everyone. ... For Latter-day Saints, RootsTech offers fun ways to help your family grow their love for Jesus Christ and the temple through inspiring messages from Church leaders. You can also learn helpful tips for using tools like Ordinance Ready found in the Member Tools and Family Tree apps to quickly and easily find ancestral names for the temple.

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Building Resilience: 3 Science-Backed Ways to Find Healing

Setbacks are not unique to life. What is unique is how well we are able to bounce back from those setbacks. This ability to bounce back—our ability to overcome and grow from life’s challenges—is known as resiliency.

When experiencing tragedy or going through challenges, you might feel too overwhelmed to even think about building resilience. Thankfully, resilience doesn’t need to happen all at once—it can start small.

Below are three simple, science-backed approaches to get you started on building resilience.

Start Where You Are

According to an article in The New York Times, the story we tell ourselves—especially the one we tell about our families—impacts our ability to be resilient. Researchers categorized these stories into three kinds of narratives. Below is a description and example of each narrative.

• Ascending Narratives: Bottom-Top stories of “We had nothing, but we worked hard, and now we’re on top.”

• Descending Narratives: Top-Bottom stories of “We used to be on top, but we lost everything. Now we’re here.”

• Oscillating Narratives: Balanced stories of “I worked hard and got a great job, but then I was laid off. I was depressed at first, but then I saw it as an opportunity to rethink my career path. Then I got a new job that I loved even more.”

Reframe the Story

The science—as highlighted by this research article—supports two key ways that reframing your story can improve resilience and overall well-being.

• Create a balanced narrative: People whose stories included the “sharing of positive moments alongside the ability to bounce back from difficult ones,” showed improved self-esteem and enhanced feelings of control and “mastery over life.” In other words, people who reframed their stories to include the good and the bad were more resilient.

• Look at the Big Picture: Those who reframed their stories to include their family story experienced an “expanded sense of self” connected to family across generations. This connection contributes to resilience “at all stages of life

Connect to Others Through Your Story

A study at Emory University asked children and adolescents 20 basic questions about their family background, such as where their parents went to high school or where their grandparents were from.

The researchers found that the more the participants understood about their families, the easier it was for them to feel self-confidence and to experience a healthy level of control over their lives. Knowing their family stories helped children and teenagers develop a sense of identity as part of something much bigger.

Take a look at the following video and see how important stories can be - at first taken for granted, then made more precious by their loss.

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The Science of Family Connection

Family History is now a multibillion-dollar industry and science is playing a greater role each year. DNA kits help us uncover our family stories and additional research is helping us understand how connecting to our family stories can help children and adults cope with the effects of stress, anxiety, depression, and build resilience.

How can we protect those narratives? How can we develop them? In a world where social celebrity is key, how can a family get to know what's important? Social media will always be there, but what about family members that won't? 

Take a look at the video below - Devin Ashby, from FamilySearch International, goes over some facts related to family cannection that offer encouragement for anyone looking for the benefits of connection. As you watch, consider this from author Bruce Feiler: "The single most important thing you can do for your family may be the simplest of all: develop a strong family narrative."

You can use FamilySearch as a collection point for pictures, documents, and audio files. A great idea is to attach audio to to pictures. For example, as noted in the video above, a family photo taken on vacation can be attached to audio of all the family membes in the picture, as they describe their feelings at the time the photo was taken. It is a good way to record the voices of children, and then, since their voices change as they grow older,  archive them in FamilySearch Memories.

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Social Media vs Family

Also referenced in the video above is this from Ikea Spain - a Christmas commercial from 2018 exposing the vanity of social media "hero worship" as it promotes the rich social connections developed in an intentional family narrative.

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RootsTech - More Reasons to Attend

RootsTech is Huge
RootsTech is the largest genealogical conference in the world. RootsTech is a place to build connections with other genealogists and family historians and do some networking. In addition, some people find relatives at RootsTech. RootsTech provides an opportunity for genealogists and family historians to meet new people and make new friends. There will be plenty of opportunities to meet people who all share the same interests.

Big Companies Will Be There
The RootsTech Expo Hall is packed with approximately 200 vendors and exhibitors. Many of them are big companies like Ancestry, Findmypast, MyHeritage, FamilySearch, LivingDNA, and Family Chart Masters. There will also be companies that offer additional services that are useful to genealogists and family historians. WordPress, for example, has been at RootsTech before.

A Learning Experience
RootsTech is open to family historians, genealogists, and people who are interested in the tech that connects to those subjects. It welcomes people who are beginners by offering a number of beginner classes. There are also advanced classes on topics such as census research, proper methodology, and more.

Each year, RootsTech has Keynote Speakers who present their knowledge and stories to large audiences at the conference. There are lunches hosted by big genealogy companies (such as FamilySearch, Findmypast, Ancestry, Living DNA, 23andMe and MyHeritage.

Technology Intersects with Genealogy
RootsTech is about preserving and sharing family stories through technology and innovation. Attendees can discover new tools and services that will help them to uncover their own family history. Topics can include: DNA testing, digitized records, and the best mobile phone apps for genealogists and family historians.

If you haven't registered already, here is a link. Remember, you don't have to go to Salt Lake City! You can register for the online part for free and learn about a thousand times more than what we've presented here.

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FamilySearch Resources

FamilySearch has released two new resource pages that are available now. Here they are:

• Leader Temple and Family History resources

  • https://www.familysearch.org/en/united-states-canada/member_resources

• My Calling: Temple and Family History Consultant

  • https://www.familysearch.org/en/consultant/

Just a note though - that second URL has a section for downloadable resources that I couldn't get to work. I sent an email to Brother Adamz at FamilySearch with a screenshot of the error so that his team could work on a fix. 

Both of the images below are clickable - try them out and take a look!

(FamilySearch is making our jobs so much easier)

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