Event emcee Kirby Heyborne opened day 2 of RootsTech 2025 Main Stage activities with enough enthusiasm to rouse any crowd of genealogists recovering from the overwhelming offerings of day 1. “I’m so thrilled to be your emcee as we explore the latest advancements shaping the future of family history and genealogy,” Kirby said. “Technology is evolving faster than ever!”
Kirby grinned, “There’s new technology! We get little hints of it, like last year, and then they develop it more. So, I’d love to see what new technology excites all of you.”
As he spoke, a giant QR code appeared for the crowd to scan with their smartphones, allowing them to respond in real time to the question, “What new technology excites you the most?” Audience responses began appearing almost before Kirby finished asking the question. The audience’s answers?
- Genealogy tools powered by artificial intelligence (AI) blasted to the top of the chart, with 49 percent of the audience rating that as the most exciting technology.
- Historical document digitization, at 23 percent, captured the interest of half of the remaining crowd.
- Automated storytelling and memory preservation came in at 10 percent.
- DNA testing and genetic genealogy was next, at 8 percent.
- Interactive family trees stood at 7 percent.
- Augmented and virtual reality was at 2 percent.
This survey made clear that members of the audience were there to discover new and better ways of doing genealogy.
Stephen Nielson, Senior Director of Product Management, Adobe
Stephen Nielson leads the Photoshop team at Adobe. He started his presentation about “how Adobe can help shape the past, present, and future using technology” by telling about his 3rd-great-grandfather Peter Nielson, who was born in 1824 on the island of Bornholm, Denmark. He is the origin of the family name and is an important part of their family history. The only existing picture of him is smeared and faded after more than a century. Some facial features could barely be made out.
Creating Something New
“Our family hired an artist . . . to create something new,” Stephen said. He “started with this photo, and using tools like Photoshop, he added details based on written accounts of his appearance, interviews with family members, and even photographs of his descendants. And after many iterations, he created something truly meaningful that generations will appreciate.”
Stephen acknowledged that the image the artist created is not historically accurate. No photograph exists that will show exactly what Peter Nielson looked like, but "to us it represents who Peter Nielson is and helps make him feel real.”
“Now let’s be clear,” Stephen said. “This kind of artistry takes skill, experience, and a trained creative eye. Adobe tools make this possible. But I'm going to show you how some new technology makes it easier for all of us to create something meaningful, even things we never thought possible.”
Adobe: Creativity for All
Three of the tools in Adobe's suite are key to what Stephen Nielson is talking about—Adobe Express, Adobe Lightroom, and Adobe Photoshop.
Adobe Express
“If you want something quick, simple, and intuitive, Adobe Express makes it easy to create stunning designs in just a few clicks,” Stephen explained. “If you want control and professional-grade photo editing, Lightroom helps you enhance and organize your images with precision. And, of course, for those who want the ultimate in creative freedom, Photoshop unlocks endless possibilities for transforming, creating, and restoring images.”
“Adobe Express is one of our newer tools designed for anyone to create anything quickly and easily,” he said. “In Express, you start with one of the hundreds of thousands of templates. It could be a memory book, a family recipe card, an invitation to a family reunion, or just something fun. Use simple tools to add your own text and photos, and create a compelling design in seconds. You don’t need to be a graphic designer. You just need a story to tell. And the best part is, it’s free."
Adobe Lightroom
“Adobe Lightroom is our tool for organizing and enhancing your photographs,” Stephen continued. “With Lightroom you can make precise edits using simple sliders and apply powerful presets with AI. Lightroom is fantastic for organizing all your photos, even allowing you to sync them all to the cloud for backup and access them on your phone. You can even remove distracting objects from an image. Lightroom is a fantastic tool to preserve your family’s memories beautifully for generations to come.”
Adobe Photoshop
“Now let’s talk about Photoshop. Photoshop is the ultimate image editor. Using the power of layers, masks, blend modes, and dozens of tools, artists can create amazing work,” he said. “Recently we’ve introduced some newer and more powerful tools in Photoshop powered by generative AI.”
“Generative AI is a cutting-edge technology that teaches an algorithm to create images rather than just edit them,” he explained. “It’s trained on millions of images, learning patterns and textures and relationships between visual elements. Instead of simply copying or manipulating pixels, it synthesizes new details by predicting what could be there based on context.”
He emphasized the importance of remembering that when used on existing images, AI is not recovering lost details but is generating them. These kinds of results are sometimes called “hallucinations.” Generative AI tools can help remove distracting objects such as tourists or telephone wires with the click of a mouse. Stephen noted that when you enhance or modify your old photographs using AI, they are no longer historically accurate. However, they become much more visually appealing as important remembrances of cherished loved ones.
Learn Something New
“I hope each of you is inspired to try something new,” Stephen said. “Learn a new tool! Experiment, even if the results are weird or creepy or disturbing at first. We at Adobe believe in creativity for all. What will you create?”
To learn more:
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Uri Gonen, Senior Vice President, Product Management, MyHeritage
“On MyHeritage, we have powerful technologies, and we always are trying to increase the value of our technology to our users,” said Uri Gonen, senior vice president of product management. “MyHeritage is a place where you can build a family tree or import it from somewhere else. . . . We use a technology that we call Smart Matching, which we are making smarter and smarter all the time, that matches your tree to millions of other family trees on MyHeritage.”
“Although very useful,” Uri pointed out, “these matches can many times also be overwhelming and daunting to work with because there’s so much data.” That can be a problem. The solution, he said, is to develop features that bring the nuggets of genealogical gold to the surface.
“In the past, we had products like Theory of Family Relativity . . . [and] Instant Discoveries,” he noted. “We are releasing another such feature called Cousin Finder, which we are announcing today at RootsTech.”
“Cousin Finder is a new feature that lets you discover other MyHeritage members who are related to you through common ancestors,” he explained. “These may be relatives that you already know. Maybe you have already invited them to your family tree, or maybe you know about them but didn’t know that they used MyHeritage. . . . Many times these are cousins that you never heard about and are finding out for the first time through this feature.” He suggested that these results can work together with DNA matches. A MyHeritage user can view relationship details and then can communicate and collaborate with relatives through MyHeritage.
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Laryn Brown, Chief Operating Officer, Storied
Laryn Brown, chief operating officer of Storied, acknowledged that starting a family history from scratch can feel overwhelming. A familiar scenario to many people at the forum is figuring out the right way to start gathering names, dates, and relationships. This effort may require searching through billions of records, sometimes with little to go on. How do you find the missing pieces of your family tree? And when you’ve compiled all the information, what then?
“That’s where Storied Assistant changes everything,” Laryn says. Storied Assistant is a personal guide to building a family tree, a way to turn facts into compelling stories.
“Today, I’m going to show you how Storied Assistant makes family history research easy, fast, and fun,” said Laryn. Instead of manually inputting names or filling out a form, you interact with Storied Assistant, which uses AI to ask “simple, relevant questions to get you started and then compares your family history information to our massive database, helping you fill in your tree in minutes, not months.”
“Searching through billions of records manually is tedious,” he continued, but Stored Assistant searches billions of records and “finds the most relevant stories, newspaper articles, [and] records related to your history and your ancestors.” Storied Assistant takes these details and “helps you turn them into a shareable story,” which can be preserved in a beautiful keepsake Storied book for the whole family.
Storied Assistant is targeted for release during summer 2025.
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Paul Allen, Chief Executive Officer and Founder, Soar.com
Paul Allen has been a tech entrepreneur most of his life. He and his like are commonly referred to as visionary, people who consider what is possible and make it reality. His projects have included Ancestry.com, MyFamily.com, and the We’re Related app, to name a few.
“All these enhancements, advancements, and data-providing tools have been very rewarding, but nothing ever compares to what AI is going to do to transform our genealogical discovery journey in the coming years,” said Paul during his RootsTech 2025 Technology and Innovations Forum address. His current project is SOAR, an AI studio with a mission to use AI to uplift humanity. “SOAR AI Studio is launching many products, . . . and now, today we announce Family Scribe.”
Allen prompted forum participants to think about the current era, the “age of intelligence, where computers understand language.” He said, “You’ve got to collect every audio, every video in your attic, in your closet, upload it to Family Scribe, transcribe every word spoken by all your relatives and loved ones because AI can now transcribe every recording and extract meaningful genealogical facts, send them to a PhD-level intelligence, and in 10 minutes you can have a month’s worth of professional genealogy research right in front of you.”
“Genealogy is about connecting the past with the present,” Paul declared. Family Scribe uses AI to “change the way we discover our family history, . . . making it instant, effortless, and deeply personal.” With the capacity to transcribe, translate, and uncover expert genealogy research, Family Scribe helps you bring your family stories to light.
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Charlie Greene, Cofounder and Chief Executive Officer, Remento
“The preservation of family history and legacy has been really important to me for my entire life,” Charlie Greene said. “A couple of weeks before I was born, my parents . . . bought one of the first handheld video camcorders on the market. . . . They used that thing to film an absolutely outrageous amount of my childhood.”
This content took on a totally different level of meaning in the years after his dad passed away shortly after Charlie's 10th birthday. Those videos became the way his family kept his dad’s legacy alive.
“As we would watch these videos, what would bring tears to our eyes wasn’t the milestone moments—it was the everyday moments,” he shares. “Moments like . . . my dad sitting at the breakfast table the morning that I was born, looking directly into the camera and explaining how nervous he was, specifically, that he hadn’t connected the car seat to the back of the car correctly.”
When his mother was diagnosed 16 years later with stage-3 lung cancer, he feared that his future children “might not have the chance to meet either of their grandparents.” None of the short-form videos of his mother they had made earlier could capture his mother’s essence in a way that could come close to that of his dad sitting at the breakfast table.
Charlie and his mother then “sat down and recorded what has traditionally been called an oral history interview,” he remembered. “I asked my mom really simple questions like ‘How did you get to elementary school?’ and ‘What was your favorite room in the house that you grew up [in]?’”
“Ultimately, it was that conversation that sparked the vision for Remento,” said Charlie. Remento makes it easy to capture and preserve memories and stories that comprise a family’s legacy.
Remento launched their “flagship product, the Remento Book,” he said, “designed to make the capture of life’s stories as simple as having a conversation. Remento Books completely write themselves. Every week Remento will send your storyteller a new storytelling prompt,” either a question or a photograph uploaded by family members.
“Remento invites your storytellers to record their response from any device” without downloading any apps or using sign-ins and passwords. The AI-powered speech-to-story technology then “transforms those recordings into transcripts and turns those transcripts into beautifully written stories drafted as if you had hired a professional biographer.”
After a year, the stories and photos are compiled into a hardcover keepsake book. The QR codes printed inside the book make it possible to watch the original recording.
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Hunter Cannon, Product Manager, Ancestry
“Ancestry has been a genealogy leader for decades, building and using tools to digitize billions of records, then extract[ing] information from those records,” said product manager Hunter Cannon. “Through investments in AI-powered handwriting recognition, content mapping, [and] hint generation, we have been able to create the largest collection of online historical records in the world, totaling 65 billion records.”
He says new technologies that include AI have assisted in collecting that information, but it’s time to empower everyone to use the same technology to enhance their ability to preserve, extract content, and make discoveries in their own family. One of the first steps in this process is scanning family history records.
“Ancestry has transformed your smartphone into a portable scanner through our app,” Hunter noted. “By using your phone’s camera and our advanced AI technology, the app automatically crops, rotates, and enhances multiple images at once. This makes it really convenient to digitize family photos wherever you are, eliminating the need to transport precious photo albums back and forth.”
Ancestry recently updated its Image Sharpen tool, which increases an image’s resolution and also sharpens image clarity. New facial recognition enhancements now allow searching other records on Ancestry to identify unknown individuals who appear in photographs with relatives.
Another scanner capability built into the Ancestry app is that of scanning multiple documents, such as journal entries, at a time and uploading them directly to a profile on Ancestry.
“Once you upload those letters and journals, we are thrilled to announce our first release of an extremely powerful tool to your Ancestry Preservation toolbox. Our handwriting recognition technology is now available for you to use on your own family’s journals and letters.”
Even if you have indecipherable handwriting or poor-quality images, it’s now possible to read and share that information with others.
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What Is RootsTech?
RootsTech is a place to learn, be inspired, and make connections through family history. Hosted by FamilySearch and sponsored by other leading genealogy organizations, RootsTech has hundreds of expert classes, tips and tricks videos, and inspiring stories that can help you experience family history like never before. Visit our on-demand learning library, or make plans to join us for our next virtual or in-person conference event.
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