03/09/2026
RootsTech 2026: What a Professional Genealogist Actually Learned
Find My Family LLC — March 2026
RootsTech 2026 wrapped March 5–7 at the Salt Palace Convention Center in Salt Lake City. If you're wondering why there was no post on Friday, I was there, all three days, mostly on the expo floor and in session rooms. Here's what I actually came away with.
The conference theme this year was "Together." Official framing from FamilySearch leaned into global connection, DNA tools, AI, and digital preservation — over 500 sessions, 150-plus exhibits, keynote speakers including NFL Hall of Famer Steve Young and Academy Award–winner Marlee Matlin. That's the brochure. Here's the practitioner version.
Navigating RootsTech: What I'd Tell a First-Timer
If you've never attended, the session selection problem alone can be overwhelming. Dozens of classes run simultaneously across multiple tracks, and you cannot cover everything. A few things that helped:
Decide your priorities before you walk in. Come knowing what you actually want out of the conference. For working professionals, that usually means two things: (1) Do I have a current client project that could benefit from something being taught here? and (2) where do I most want to grow? Build your schedule backward from those answers.
Protect the in-person-only sessions first. RootsTech has a large on-demand library of recorded sessions you can watch anytime after the conference. If something is being streamed, you can catch it later. The sessions that are not recorded are the ones worth guarding in your calendar. More advanced practitioners tend to concentrate in those rooms, and the scarcity alone raises the quality of attention you bring.
Use the session rooms as a decompression. The expo hall is relentless — noise, crowds, pitches. By mid-afternoon, most people are running low regardless of how prepared they were. Sitting in a session is quieter and structured. I ended up treating afternoon classes as intentional recovery time, not just programming I'd planned in advance.
The Expo Floor: Strategy Matters More Than You'd Think
The expo hall this year had somewhere around 150–200 vendors, and you could realistically spend all three days on the floor without seeing everything. A few things worth knowing before you go:
Start your expo exploration on day one, not day three. Most deals are RootsTech specials that run the full conference — but some booths have staff present only on certain days, and a handful weren't there all three days. I missed at least one conversation I'd been planning because the booth was unstaffed by Saturday. If there's a specific vendor you want to talk to, find them on Thursday. You don't want to arrive on Saturday and find an empty table with a QR code where a person used to be.
Afternoon is when the green light specials start. Vendors run time-limited discount offers in the afternoons — flash pricing on DNA kits, subscriptions, and chart products. They're not always advertised in advance. The upside is a genuine deal. The downside is that the whole mechanism is designed to encourage impulse purchases, often on products you've already seen at three other booths. My approach: walk the whole hall first, sleep on anything significant, and only pull the trigger on a green light special if you already knew you wanted it before the discount appeared.
Walk the entire hall before committing to anything. Similar products are intentionally placed far apart on the floor. This year, there were multiple vendors offering nearly identical services — personalized children's books from family stories was one obvious category — and you wouldn't know they were direct competitors unless you'd done a full lap. Do the full lap first.
Know what you're actually being offered. A few things I noticed this year: some booths were staffed by floor reps with fact sheets rather than by anyone who works the product day-to-day. The difference is usually apparent quickly — the day-to-day person gives real numbers and real answers. Some booths were also holding materials for other organizations that couldn't afford to send anyone: brochures, business cards, and a generic mention. It's not deceptive, but if you're interested in the organization being represented and the booth staff has no real knowledge of them, it's a dead end.
Push for pricing. Several booths were reluctant or unable to give a cost estimate. I understand that some services require scoping before quoting, and I understand salespeople are trained to explain value before disclosing price. But if I can't get even a ballpark, I can't evaluate whether integrating your product into my practice makes business sense. If a booth can't give you a number on the floor, make a note and follow up after the conference when you can evaluate without the pressure.
On the passport program: RootsTech runs a passport-style stamp-collecting program that directs attendees to particular booths in exchange for prizes. I'll be direct — I don't love it, and here's why. The participating booths are consistently the busiest on the floor, not with people who want a real conversation. They're busy with people who want a stamp. If you're trying to get substantive time with a knowledgeable rep at one of those booths, you're competing with a queue of stamp collectors, and the reps know it. It encourages foot traffic but degrades the quality of interaction for anyone who actually wants one. My preference is the quieter booths — smaller vendors where nobody's racing through with a passport — because that's where you can actually talk. If you want the elevator-pitch version of a major company's product, its website has it. The smaller vendors are the ones worth having a real conversation with, and a real conversation is the whole point of being there in person.
On Subscriptions, Longevity, and Knowing What You're Buying
The expo floor had a significant number of tools that, on closer inspection, were repackaging capabilities you can access for free if you know where to look. NotebookLM is free. Google AI Studio is free. Many paid genealogy tools are layering a UI on top of model APIs you can reach directly. That's not inherently wrong — good packaging has real value — but you should know what you're paying for before you sign up.
Subscriptions deserve particular scrutiny. Once you're on a recurring billing cycle, it's easy to keep paying without reassessing value. Ask yourself: is this a genuinely novel solution, or a more convenient wrapper around something that already exists? Is the problem it solves continuous or occasional?
The deeper issue is longevity. Having attended RootsTech over the years, I've seen the pattern: an exciting launch, an enthusiastic booth, a compelling pitch. Then you come back the following year, and the company is gone, acquired, or has quietly stopped updating. For anything involving data preservation or long-term storage of family materials, I weigh heavily toward tools built on infrastructure from established, multi-decade providers. A startup building on top of Google's, Amazon's, or Microsoft's infrastructure is more trustworthy than one running proprietary back-end systems, because if the startup disappears, your data doesn't necessarily go with it. Some booths were notably vague about what's powering their product. That vagueness is a yellow flag.
A few longevity signals I use personally when walking the floor:
How many years has this vendor been at RootsTech? RootsTech started in 2011, so there's a meaningful track record to ask about. A vendor who's been exhibiting for five or more years, through COVID and everything else, is telling you something about their staying power that a first-time exhibitor simply can't. I'd love to see RootsTech itself add visible tenure badges to booth signage — it would save a lot of questions and help attendees make faster assessments. Until then, just ask.
Does the product carry FamilySearch certification, and what happens if it lapses? FamilySearch periodically reviews and revokes certifications from partner products — it happens regularly, not as an edge case. I've seen products I genuinely liked lose their FamilySearch certification and effectively close up shop within a short time afterward. If a tool's primary selling point is FamilySearch integration or compatibility, that certification is load-bearing. If it lapses — because the company can't or won't maintain the technical standards FamilySearch Engineering requires — the product often goes with it. A FamilySearch-certified badge is worth something, but it's only as durable as the relationship behind it.
My personal rule for new memory and preservation products: wait a year. If a product looks interesting but has just been launched, I make a note and look for it at next year's conference. If they're back, they've survived a year of real-world use, customer feedback, and the normal attrition rate of startups. They've probably fixed early bugs and added features. And critically, I can talk to them about what's actually changed since launch rather than what they're planning to build. "We're planning to add that feature" is a very different thing from "we added that feature six months ago." If they're not back next year, I've saved myself from a product that didn't survive.
Learn to spot gimmicks. A gimmick, as I define it, is a product with a flashy or clever surface idea that, underneath, does something you could already do on another system for less money — or free. The appeal is the novelty or the packaging, not a genuine capability you couldn't get elsewhere. RootsTech has a meaningful number of these every year, and they tend to draw crowds. As someone who's attended for nearly a decade, I've gotten reasonably good at identifying them quickly. The question I ask: strip away the interface and the branding — what is this actually doing, and can I do that already? If the answer is yes, the only remaining question is whether the packaging is worth the price, which is a much smaller question than it looked like from the booth display.
Narrow use-case products are a related category. Not quite gimmicks, but tools that do one specific thing well and nothing else. Sometimes that's exactly what you need. More often, for a working professional, you need tools that earn their place in a workflow across many different project types, not just the one scenario the product was built around. There used to be booths with broad genealogical reference libraries — major textbooks, research guides you could browse and buy on the spot. I didn't see that this year in the way I have in the past. If you're hoping to stock up on reference texts at RootsTech, manage your expectations.
On chart printers: there are a lot of them, and the market is saturated. Worth knowing they exist; hard to meaningfully differentiate between them on the floor.
On 23andMe: they were present — a small booth in a corner — which I didn't necessarily expect given their recent financial turbulence. Their presence suggests stabilization, but do your own due diligence if you have data there.
On nonprofit and society booths: a meaningful portion of the expo floor is taken up by lineage societies, regional genealogical organizations, and groups focused on public awareness and member recruitment rather than selling anything. Some are specifically looking for descendants of particular individuals for DNA projects and are willing to cover testing costs. Worth a conversation if the focus area overlaps with your research.
Set a shopping budget before you walk in. This deserves its own warning. RootsTech is not just a conference — it's also a marketplace, and it's easy to spend significant money without quite realizing how it happened. Beyond the software subscriptions and DNA kits, the floor features ancestor-themed jewelry, custom t-shirts, family history games, and LEGO-adjacent family history building sets. There are videographers selling memory capture services, artists offering illustrated family portraits, and vendors for almost every genealogy-adjacent product you can imagine. Some of it is genuinely useful; some of it is the kind of thing you'll unbox once. Decide before you arrive how much you're comfortable spending on what I'll call souvenirs, and stick to that line.
Know the booth calculus before you feel the pressure. It helps to understand why these vendors are there. For many of them — and this includes some of the more intangible service providers — the math is simple. Booth cost plus one person's time equals a break-even point that only requires a small number of serious clients to turn a profit. A will and estate planning attorney, for example, doesn't need many people to say yes. A search angel training program at $500 per enrollment (for a volunteer position, which I'll note is a pricing choice worth examining) needs even fewer. Everyone in that hall is there because the math works at scale, with thousands of people walking past. Understanding that helps you evaluate pressure and urgency differently.
Shop around, especially for services. For any significant purchase — particularly services with multiple vendors in the same category — resist the first yes. As a professional who sells services myself, I know exactly why a salesperson wants a decision before you walk away: the odds of return are low once someone moves on. As a consumer, that same logic argues for the opposite. Walk further. Talk to more people. The rate and quality differences within a single product category can be substantial, and a few more minutes of comparison shopping can significantly change the outcome.
On memorial products: at least one vendor offered QR code integration for grave markers — scan the code to access memories, photos, or videos of the deceased. I understand the appeal. I'd be cautious about the longevity question. A well-made headstone can last a century or more. The odds that a specific QR code platform and its associated content will still be accessible in 50 years are considerably lower. Linking a permanent physical monument to a digital service with an uncertain lifespan is a mismatch worth thinking through before committing.
The AI Signal Was Impossible to Miss
The biggest theme running through both the session tracks and the expo floor was artificial intelligence — not as future speculation, but as current implementation.
One tool came up in session after session, from multiple presenters with no coordination between them: NotebookLM (free, from Google). The consistency of that recommendation across independent sessions was the most notable pattern I observed all conference. Feed it your research sources, and it generates slide decks, reports, audio summaries, and mind maps. It's the most-recommended AI on-ramp in genealogy right now, it's free, and the repeated, independent endorsement from serious practitioners carries weight.
Beyond NotebookLM, the broader AI transcription picture has shifted materially. Ancestry, MyHeritage, and FamilySearch — all of the major platforms now have AI transcription built in. The competition for accuracy across handwriting styles and historical periods is accelerating. Collections that were difficult to search because they were handwritten and unindexed are being processed at rates that were impossible a few years ago. For common scripts from recent centuries — English documents from the 1800s being the clearest example — AI transcription isn't approaching human accuracy so much as it's already there for practical purposes, and in some cases it's outperforming everyone but an advanced paleographer. Documents that would take an experienced researcher a painful line-by-line effort to decode get processed in seconds with accuracy that holds up on the critical details. The caveats are real: AI systems can be overconfident, occasionally hallucinate text, and some struggle to follow specific formatting instructions. Highly obscure or underrepresented scripts still benefit from specialist human review. But for the bulk of genealogical document work, the spot-check-and-correct workflow — AI transcribes, human reviews names, dates, and places — is now faster than human-only transcription. That's a real shift in how this work gets done.
One observation from the floor: there was at least one illustration booth explicitly advertising that it uses hand-illustrated, artist-verified work. I understand the market position. But you are paying a significant premium for that guarantee, and you should go in knowing it.
Practical Logistics
Fatigue is universal. By afternoon each day, most people are depleted regardless of preparation. Plan for it rather than fight it.
Food and drink are expensive. $15–20 for a meal is standard; self-serve drinks are $5, and the price isn't obvious until after you've tapped your card. Bring snacks.
Parking runs roughly $25/day. Public transit is worth using if you can. A hotel within walking distance changes the math entirely — you lose the commute, recover your evenings, and can use the Family History Library after hours.
The Family History Library is still essential. Some records exist only in physical form — microfilm and microfiche not yet cleared for digital publication, and some online records are accessible only from within the FamilySearch Library or an affiliated center. If you can build in library time, do it.
A note on the virtual vendor hall: RootsTech maintains a virtual expo experience for online attendees. Having seen this from the vendor side during the COVID years, I'll be honest — it doesn't really work. Vendor halls are an in-person experience. The conversations, the serendipitous discoveries, the ability to read a rep's body language and decide whether they actually know their product — none of that translates to a screen. I'm not sure why you'd voluntarily go online to browse what are effectively interactive ads when the entire value of the hall is being there.
A Missed Opportunity Worth Naming
This is less a critique than a genuine wish: RootsTech should consider a professional preview half-day — credential-gated, before the general conference opens — where working genealogists, business owners, and credentialed practitioners can walk the vendor hall without competing with the general public for attention.
Here's why it would matter. Right now, if you want to have a serious conversation with a vendor about workflow integration, affiliate arrangements, enterprise pricing, or how their product fits into a professional practice rather than a hobbyist's use case — you're having that conversation in the middle of a crowd, next to people getting their passports stamped, while the rep has one eye on the queue behind you. That's not the environment for a real business conversation.
A professionals-only window — even two or three hours — changes the dynamic entirely. Vendors would know they're talking to people with specific business interests, not general consumers. Professionals could ask the questions they'd otherwise feel awkward asking in public. Pricing, referral structures, integration deals, workflow questions — the kind of talk you don't want overheard. APG runs a professional management conference separately, but having that energy applied directly to the vendor floor before the doors open to the general public would be genuinely valuable.
I don't expect it to happen. But it's a real missed opportunity, and I'd pay for that access without hesitation.
RootsTech 2026 was a large event in a moment when the field is changing fast. AI tools, expanding record access, and a proliferation of new products are happening simultaneously. The opportunity is real. So is the risk of spending money on things that don't survive until next year's conference.
The practitioners who come in with clear priorities, a plan for the floor, and discipline around what they actually need rather than what looks good under green lights tend to leave with the most.
Andre Bagley, AG®, ICAPGen | Find My Family LLC
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