RootsTech 2025 with BillionGraves was an exciting and inspiring event for family history enthusiasts. Come peek over our shoulder and share our experience, as the BillionGraves team attended the world’s largest genealogy conference in Salt Lake City, Utah, March 6 – 8, surrounded by tens of thousands of passionate genealogists. Millions more joined in virtually with the free online RootsTech conference.
RootsTech is hosted by FamilySearch and is in its 15th year of existence. The very name of the conference – “RootsTech” – reveals the dual focus on finding family roots and innovations in genealogical technology.
RootsTech 2025 offered BillionGraves enthusiasts valuable insights into cemetery documentation, online historical research, and strategies for involving younger generations in preserving family history.
RootsTech 2025 Theme: Discover
The theme for RootsTech 2025, Discover, focused on inspiring attendees to explore their family history, deepen connections, and learn more about themselves.
According to event organizers, the theme Discover encapsulates the emotional impact of finding a long-lost family story, record, or name—bringing a powerful sense of connection and personal identity.
Participants listened as keynote speaker CEO Steve Rockwood share a family story about his great-great-grandfather who migrated from the Northeast United States to the Salt Lake Valley and tried to introduce lobsters into the Great Salt Lake. It didn’t work, but if it had, Rockwood joked that his ancestor may have started the “Rockwood Lobster Shack” dynasty.
As the story built to a climax, a lobster was delivered to the stage by drone and streamers shot out from the stage like confetti. Rockwood said he learned this story about his great-great-grandfather through someone who shared it with the global family history research pool. Thanks to this, he, his children, and grandchildren know their own family story better — and as a result, know themselves better.
“What is your ‘lobster’ waiting to be discovered? Have you shared what you know with all of us in the industry so we can each begin our journey of discovery?” Rockwood said.
Family history organizations, like BillionGraves, work to help people all over the world discover everything possible about their families.
RootsTech 2025: BillionGraves Expo Hall Booth
In the RootsTech Expo Hall, participants learned firsthand from the BillionGraves Team at the BillionGraves booth about how to document cemeteries around the world and find ancestors to add to their family tree.
Thousands of people stopped at the BillionGraves booth where young and old alike learned how they could volunteer to take photos of gravestones and find a cemetery to document by downloading the BillionGraves app.
RootsTech 2025: BillionGraves Interactive Pin
Participants at RootsTech 2025 who came to the BillionGraves booth were in for a special surprise as they were given a free interactive pin with a “magical” chip inside that helped them to find more family connections.
The pins were shaped like the BillionGraves logo. When they were pressed to the back of a mobile phone, an internal NFC chip caused information to appear on the phone screen.
Members of the BillionGraves team, like Lead Developer Casey Moncur, who designed the features of the pin, explained how to use it.
When activated, the BillionGraves interactive pin revealed:
- Famous Family – discover your famous relatives, from celebrities to historical figures
- My Family – discover photos of your own family’s headstones
- Scanned Pins – discover how you are related to others at the RootsTech conference by scanning each other’s pins
- Historical Societies – discover historical societies that are located near the places where your ancestor was born, married, lived, or died
BillionGraves at RootsTech 2025: BillionGraves Classes
BillionGraves also sponsored a presentation at the conference by Cathy Wallace (yours truly), titled “Gravestone Symbols from A to Z“. A is for anchor; B is for book; C is for Celtic Cross . . .
Understanding Gravestone Symbols from A to Z helped attendees learn to “read” a cemetery so they could discover their ancestors’ interests, religion, club memberships, values, and more.
The presentation included hundreds of gravestone photos from around the world, fun stories, research tips to help participants grow their family tree, and a 14-page syllabus.
This class was just one of more than 200 inspiring classes offered at RootsTech 2025.
BillionGraves also has a free online class on the virtual RootsTech platform about Funeral Traditions in the Victorian Era. You can watch it by clicking HERE.
BillionGraves at RootsTech 2025: Partner Connections
As a member of the RootsTech media team, I was given the opportunity to interview some of leading genealogists from other organizations. MyHeritage is one of BillionGraves’ partners so I chose to interview Maor Malul, community manager of MyHeritage Wiki.
Maor is orginally from Venezula and now lives in Israel where MyHeritage is based. Since 2005, he has been a contributor to the Wikimedia movement, writing more than 2,000 articles on various Wikipedias in Spanish, English, Portuguese, Ladino, Wayuunaiki, and Hebrew.
Maor said that the mission of MyHeritage Wiki is “give back to the genealogy community what we have learned in our respective journeys”. He added, “If I had someone guiding me when I first started doing genealogy, teaching me the tips and tricks, I would have learned faster and my genealogy would have been much more effective.”
Maor said the MyHeritage Wiki articles about cemeteries are especially important and many of them link to BillionGraves’ database of cemetery resources.
He added, “At MyHeritage, we believe in bringing family history to life, and cemeteries play a crucial role in that mission. By documenting and sharing knowledge about these sacred spaces, we empower individuals to reconnect with their ancestors, ensuring that their legacies are never forgotten.”
Click image to play video
MyHeritage Wiki is looking for volunteers to contribute articles to the MyHeritage Wiki. Maor said, “As genealogists, we focus on the past but we also need to think of the future. What are we going to teach our children? We need to teach them what we have learned and how to do it. Everybody knows something that nobody else knows. Everybody knows something better than everyone else. It’s good to share that.”
MyHeritage has even offered to bring any MyHeritage Wiki volunteers that contribute 70 articles within a year to RootsTech the following year.
BillionGraves at RootsTech 2025: Discovering Ancestors
Lost and Found Ancestor
One of the great things about being a part of RootsTech is meeting BillionGraves volunteers from around the world – like Sheralyn Belyeu of Alabama.
Sheralyn shared this story with us: “A few years ago I was a host for a cemetery tour in a small town in Alabama. I was told that it didn’t matter where a particular re-enactor stood for the tour because he represented a man who had been buried in a Jewish cemetery in Birmingham.
“I had photographed the cemetery, and I knew that the well-loved man we were talking about was buried in our town, not in Birmingham. The cemetery isn’t particularly large, with fewer than 4,000 legible headstones, but we didn’t have time to search for his stone during our rehearsals. Later, I opened my BillionGraves app and used the GPS to walk directly to the correct grave, which I showed to the cemetery tour organizers.
“The deceased man’s daughter-in-law came to the cemetery tour, and I was very grateful that the re-enactor was standing in the correct location when she arrived!”
https://billiongraves.com/…/Alexander-City-Cemetery/308404
A Community United by History
The Pierce/Putan family was so excited to find an ancestor on the BillionGraves website while visiting the BillionGraves booth at RootsTech that they were literally cheering!
BillionGraves is more than just a technological tool—it’s a community effort. Every volunteer who contributes a photo, every story that’s shared, builds a bridge between the past and the future. By participating, you’re not only safeguarding precious historical data but also joining a worldwide network committed to honoring our shared heritage.
BillionGraves at RootsTech 2025: Behind the Scenes
We’ll even give you a peek behind the scenes at the BillionGraves booth at RootsTech 2025. As you can imagine, set up for a conference of this proportion is monumental (pun intended).
Utah Headstone Designs brought a dozen gravestones to the BillionGraves booth this year so they could be used to demonstrate how use the BillionGraves app to take photos.
Using the crane on the back of their truck, the gravestones were hoisted by straps on a pulley and lowered into place. The gravestones weighed up to 1,000 pounds each so this was no easy feat!
RootsTech participants often stopped on a dime to take a better look at the BillionGraves cemetery booth, which gave the BillionGraves team a chance to show them how to use the BillionGraves app.
The BillionGraves app is used to take photos of gravestones to help digitally preserve cemetery records and make them accessible for genealogical and historical research. By capturing images of gravestones, users contribute to a growing database that documents burial locations, inscriptions, and other vital information.
These images are then transcribed and made searchable online, allowing family historians, researchers, and descendants to locate ancestors’ graves and uncover important details about their heritage. The app’s GPS tagging feature ensures precise location data, making it easier for others to find and verify gravestones in the future.
One visitor to the BillionGraves booth just couldn’t resist trying out the cemetery! (We invited him to rest in peace.)
Join Us at RootsTech 2026!
RootsTech 2025 offered BillionGraves fans opportunities to learn about photographing cemeteries, transcribing gravestone data, genealogical research, and ideas for involving youth in preserving family history.
If you missed it, be sure to check out the on-demand sessions and start planning for next year! The next RootsTech conference will be March 5 – 7, 2026 in Salt Lake City, Utah, and online. We hope you’ll join us!
Volunteer with BillionGraves
We need YOUR help documenting cemeteries in your area! Click HERE to get started.
You are welcome to do this at your own convenience, no permission from us is needed. If you would like help planning a large group project or if you still have questions after you have clicked on the link above to get started, email us at Volunteer@BillionGraves.com.
Many thanks to all of you who continue to serve! Your photos and transcriptions are helping millions of people around the world to find their ancestors and grow their family trees.
Happy Cemetery Hopping!
Cathy Wallace
RootsTech 2025 with BillionGraves
