Randy (Not) at RootsTech 2025 - Day 1 (Thursday, 6 March) Activities

The RootsTech 2025 Conference started today live in Salt Lake City, Utah with thousands of persons in attendance, and thousands more watching some of the conference classes online for free.  I chose to be an online viewer rather than an in-person attendee due to my physical restrictions.

Over the past week, I have selected online classes for "My Schedule" and have downloaded syllabus articles for many of the online and in-person classes.   You can see the current list of RootsTech 2025 online and in-person speakers and presentation titles in https://www.familysearch.org/en/rootstech/schedule/preview.

My activities today were sandwiched around my visit to see my wife in her memory care facility but I was able to watch some of the classes on my class schedule.   Here are the classes that I watched, either partially or completely:

• Jim Brewster’s classes on Using Genetic Genealogy to Break Down a Brick Wall – Parts 1, 2, 3. This was a Y DNA case study.

• Julia Anderson’s class on Beyond the Brick Wall: Strategies for Pre-1850 U.S. Research. This class was excellent – she worked from death to birth, uncovered 3 marriages of Hannah Jeffries, and identified her parents and siblings using death, marriage, Quaker and census records.

• Alice Childs' class on Intersecting Lines: Pedigree Collapse Helps Identify an Ancestor’s Parents. This class dealt with autosomal DNA matches.

• The FamilySearch Global and Tech Forum 2025 panel with Valerie Villalobos Huitron (discussing the new FS Family Group Family Tree ); Craig Miller (discussing the new AI Help Chatbot); Bryan Austad (dscussing the new Together Family Stories app); Andrew Gold (discussing the new AI Research Assistant); Michelle Barber (discussing the existing Full Text Search -- now with 1.2 billion images, many record types, transcription, summary, source, link); Ryan Parker (discussing Tree Integrity), and Sarah Hammon (with Q&A).

• Thursday Keynote talks in RootsTech 2025 | General Session 1 | Rachel Platten and Steve Rockwood and Ancestry (Crista Cowan). Steve discussed the RootsTech theme – Discover. Crista talked about her career, family stories, the new Ancestry Network, added records (now with 65 billion records from 88 countries (added 5 billion in last year), 1.1 billion photos and stories, 143 million trees, 27 million DNA tests). Rachel Platten couldn’t be there in-person, but discussed her life and family with the moderator Kirby Heyborne on video and sang a song. Matt and Savanna Shaw told family stories and sang several songs.

• Watched Jill Morelli’s class on Tracing Your Danish Roots: Essential Skills for Beginner Genealogists. History, names, words, unique letters, indexes, records. Excellent!

• Crista Cowan’s class on What’s New at Ancestry® in 2025. She shared many life stories, the Ancestry card catalog, and the new Ancestry Network in Pro Tools (where you can put tree persons into groups for shared experiences – community, church members, military units, neighbors, friends, witnesses, etc. in a time and/or place)

• Jill Reilly (NARA) and Ian James (FamilySearch) class on Leveraging Partnerships, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Community Engagement to Improve Discoverability of Records. They discussed the USA's 250th Anniversary in 2026 and indexing Revolutionary War pension files.

• Steve Little’s class on AI Genealogy: Year Two: The 2025 Outlook: Where We’ve Been, Where We’re At, Where We’re Headed. Excellent discussion of the topic, but light on examples.

• Mark Thompson’s class on Learn Genealogy Faster and Easier with Artificial Intelligence. Excellent discussion about prompting, and examples for defining genetic genealogy shared cMs, for creating a locality guide, and for learning old English handwritten transcription.

I also browsed the Expo Hall page (whih first appeared this morning) to get a sense of the companies and organizations that were exhibitors.  The most advanced technology I saw was the Remento life story book feature.

Lastly, I checked the Relatives at RootsTech page and saw that I have 74,052 relatives listed at RootsTech.

My closest relative is a first cousin 1x removed whom I know in my Seaver line, and the next closest cousin is George, a 3rd cousin 1x removed in my Kemp line.  I am randyseaver1 if you want to see how I am related to you.  

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Disclosure:  I am a RootsTech 2025 "Influencer" but will receive no remuneration for my support or posting of RootsTech information.  I will be an online participant this year because of my health issues.

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