It’s well-known that many people who take a genetic ancestry test get surprised — “very surprised,” according to genealogist Jeanette Daniels.
That includes her. This caucasian woman raised in the South authored “African American Genealogical Research” after finding Black ancestry in her own family tree. That led to connecting with many living African-American cousins today.
“I didn’t have a clue that I had anything like that in my background.”
Genealogist Adina Newman likewise described clients being surprised to learn they are 12% or 25% Jewish. “We’re more connected than we think,” Newman, a co-founder of the Holocaust Reunion Project, said. “You find out that maybe the neighbor next door was closer than you thought.”
Daniels and Newman were two of the 20,000 participants at this week’s 15th annual RootsTech conference in Salt Lake City.
It’s hard to feel prejudice towards a group discovered in your own family tree, according to many experts and leaders in the field. “When we find out how we’re connected, we then treat each other differently,” said Steve Rockwood, CEO of FamilySearch.
One great family
Whatever learning comes from realizing the true diversity of one’s recent heritage, there’s another discovery that happens when you go even further back to explore more ancient “archaic DNA,” according to Bill Arzt at GEDmatch.
“If you only look at 10 to 20 generations back, maybe you get back to the 800-900s,” he said. But if you “go way back” thousands of years, that’s “where it really comes together,” and people realize “how we all interrelate together at some level.”
You can “see that at the chromosome level” at that point, that, in fact, “we’re really not so different,” Arzt said.
This realization doesn’t depend on DNA analysis alone. “If you do family history for a while,” said Elder Kevin S. Hamilton, executive director of the Family History Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “one of the things you figure out pretty quickly is we’re pretty much all connected.”
Elder Hamilton referred to “relative finders” at FamilySearch and the RootsTech app (which reveal relationships between anyone on the app or at the conference), saying, “It dawns on you after a bit that we really are one family.”
Elder Mark A. Bragg, assistant executive director at FamilySearch, told the Deseret News about meetings he had the previous day with individuals from Ukraine, Russia, Albania, Croatia and Serbia — all trying to find past records of their people.
“As we get involved in family history, we start to see the world through a different lens. We start to see it through a family lens.”
That leads to appreciating a “global family” and, as an expression of his faith, “a family of God.”
“We are all one, actually,” agreed Gopakumar Pillai, referring to the 5,000-year-old family history of India that their organization, SBL, specializes in.
A Native American organization at the event called “Gathering of Tribes” also works to help unite families through family history and shared faith.
A universal common ground?
Genealogist Jennifer Mendelsohn, also with the Holocaust Reunion Project, described watching the same pattern repeat itself. In her research for others across different backgrounds, she would see a birth record go something like, “the sexton of the town announces that on a certain day appeared before him the Taylors (or so and so), announcing that a child was born in his home to his wife.”
“People are people, across boundaries, across time frames, people do the same exact things,” she said. “They’re born, they get married, they have children, they die, they’re buried. The rituals change from place to place and time to time, but it is something that we all have in common.”
“It’s hard wired into our DNA” to “connect and belong,” said Elder Hamilton. “We want to be part of a family,” he added. This is “something that we all care about.”
‘We can’t help but love each other’
“Family history is a great unifier,” said Ann Harrison, Director of Global Engagement at RootsTech. When any of us find out we’re connected, she said, “we can’t help but love each other, and it breaks down those walls.”
“It breaks down the animosity,” she said. “The things that we thought were so different about us lessen because we realize we have all these commonalities.
“You don’t have to be very long in the same room with someone talking about family to start feeling love for them.”
Elder Massimo De Feo, a General Authority Seventy of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, called family history a wonderful way to open hearts. This is thanks to the deep attachment that most people feel towards current connections and family memories, he said, as well as the fact that families are where most people “start feeling love, developing love and understanding love.”
Calling family history a “great unifying force,” Katharina Birch, business owner of Genealogy Tees, explained that in genealogy, “we celebrate diversity — all of where we all come from — and we make it one.”
A growing gathering
This annual convening of RootsTech aggregates an astonishing number of classes, attendees and virtual watchers. There were 240 classes offered at the Salt Palace this week — roughly half available virtually (freely available and recorded for access later)— with classes available in over 40 different languages.
When it first started in 2011, RootsTech had 1,000-2,000 attendees — growing to 20,000 or so by the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. The first year the conference allowed virtual access, 1.5 million joined, with 3 million the second year, and 4 million and 5 million the next two years.
This year, the conference has exceeded those numbers by significant margins, according to the organizers, who haven’t released official figures. Participants hail from virtually every country in the world, including North Korea. Elder Hamilton noted thousands of people from Iraq attending online.
He also highlighted what should be obvious: that most of the 100 million annual users of FamilySearch are not members of the church. “The whole world can participate in building the family tree of humanity.”
Boosting mental health and grounding identity
Family history is not something to start doing when 60, 70 and 80 “as a retirement project only,” said Charlie Greene, one of the founders of the Remento storytelling app. “It’s also something to prioritize early on while you’re still figuring out who you are.”
“We discover who we are by understanding where we come from,” said RootsTech master of ceremonies Kirby Heyborne. “When we connect with our roots, we discover new traditions, new perspectives and new meaning in our lives.”
“Family History is an adventure filled with surprises, challenges and moments of pure joy,” said Aaron Godfrey, vice president of marketing with MyHeritage.
Steve Rockwood, president and CEO of FamilySearch International, spoke about “the joy” of people “knowing their own family story, knowing who they are, knowing where they come from.”
“Isn’t that what we all want for the young people in our lives?” he asked, highlighting “the strength, the resilience and joy that comes from knowing their own family history and thus their true identity.”
Close friends not far away?
“Some of our closest friends are long gone ancestors who continue to participate in our lives to teach us and guide us, uplift us and be a source of support and strength,” said Wally Goddard. Goddard, a former professor of Family Life at Utah State University, is presenting at Saturday’s Family Discovery Day on “Creating Vibrant Connections with Your Ancestors,” about his experiences applying a five-part model for friendship building in relation to those who are immortal.
Rather than just ignoring those departed as far away, he said, “If we’re mindful of them, if we lean in, if we turn toward their bids for connection, then we’ll find greater and greater closeness,” along with “greater love and peace.”
Goddard was asked, “You’re saying we can build friendships with these people?”
“Absolutely. We can build friendships. They can be close friends as well as actual advocates pleading our cause on high.”