On July 24, 1994, a Mazda minivan, carrying Jonathan Wing’s family of six, a dog and everything they owned rolled into the Salt Lake Valley.
Wing, who was 8 at the time, still remembers the dramatic sweep of the mountains opening up ahead. Their arrival from Canada was marked by the thunder of Pioneer Day fireworks, as if celebrating a fresh start.
“We had zero context for what Pioneer Day was,” said Wing, the man behind RootsTech, the world’s largest family history conference, kicking off this week both online and in-person in Salt Lake City.
The son of a Filipina mother and a father from the Netherlands, Wing didn’t always feel at home in the new land his family had brought him to. But the knowledge that he was on a journey that the men and women in his family had made before him helped him unearth a confidence that was previously unfamiliar.
His great-grandfather had left China for the United Kingdom. A generation later, his grandfather struck out for the Netherlands. And his father, still a teenager, left the Netherlands for Canada.
“I was able to draw strength from that because it had been done before,” Wing told me in a recent Zoom interview.
Today, Wing helps others discover that same strength he’s found in his family stories of perseverance and overcoming. RootsTech, in its 16th year, is organized by FamilySearch, a nonprofit genealogy organization supported by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Under the theme “Together,” the event is slated to bring millions of participants from more than 230 countries and territories, both online and in person at the Salt Palace Convention Center.
It’s an overwhelming undertaking for even an experienced event planner like Wing. A week before the conference, which will feature former NFL MVP Steve Young, National Geographic explorer Tara Roberts and a known Filipina journalist Jessica Soho, Wing was fielding last-minute changes.
Since joining the RootsTech planning team in 2016 and becoming FamilySearch’s events director in 2024, Wing helped transform RootsTech into a sprawling global, and increasingly more digital, gathering for genealogists and tech leaders, surpassing what anyone initially imagined it would become.
There are courses, which range from beginner to expert, on how death and serious diseases have been documented in the U.S. since the 1900s and using DNA to trace the origins of orphans transported to the West from Europe and the East Coast. This year, the conference will continue to tackle AI technology and how it could reshape the future of family history research (there is a session titled: “Transforming Family History into Song with AI”).
But beneath the innovation and expertise, Wing believes, is a deeper, more human force that binds it all together.
“I personally believe that each of us has this innate desire to know: Where do we come from? Or where do I come from?” Wing told me.
Why we carry certain traits or why a family dish only tastes right when it’s made by your grandmother — the pull of these questions is powerful, and not just for believers, Wing said. Over 90% of RootsTech attendees are not Latter-day Saints.
“We all have this innate desire to turn to our ancestors and the stories that made them who they are, and that is ultimately a part of our story because, in essence, it sheds light on our own identity on who we are.”
The man who loved and tried everything
Growing up in Niagara Falls, Wing never suspected that his mother spoke with an accent until someone pointed it out.
“It was the voice of my mother that I grew up with,” he said.
The Filipino, Dutch and Chinese heritage of his parents colored the daily rhythms of his childhood (he’s also got German and Irish blood).
On the days the family — which grew to a family of eight after arriving in Utah — ate Filipino food, Wing and his siblings dove into rice and stews with their hands. Dining with his European grandparents involved a more rigid table etiquette — knives and forks, even when eating pizza. But regardless of the meal, it was accompanied by family stories.
When his father was in medical school in Hong Kong, Wing’s parents converted to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They had already been reading the Bible on their own and wrestling with passages they didn’t understand. So when missionaries knocked on their door, his father met them with a list of questions. The family joined a small, tight-knit branch.
“So when we moved, it was like leaving family,” Wing recalled.
Unlike his pragmatic father, Wing gravitated toward more creative pursuits — much like his paternal grandfather Howard Wing Sr., who was an Olympic velodrome cyclist, a designer of storefronts for Christian Dior and an oil painter.
“He was a man who tried everything and loved everything,” Wing said. “I feel like I could relate to that.”
Wing came alive exploring his eclectic interests. He filmed himself preparing dishes, turning family recipes from the Filipino, Dutch and Chinese cuisines into informal tutorials. After difficult days at school, he would sit at the piano and lose himself while playing pieces by Sergei Rachmaninoff. He performed in family productions alongside his sisters, and during his Latter-day Saint mission in Florida, learned to arrange hymns. Wing’s personal website features a collection of his videos where he performs his arrangements with various guests.
“I loved to create and my parents built a home where creativity could be fostered,” he said.
Home cooking videos grew into a career path, for a time. After getting a business degree from BYU’s Marriott School, Wing shocked his parents by announcing he was moving to Los Angeles to study at Le Cordon Bleu, the renowned culinary school, and work in food television. He went on to test recipes and style dishes for The Los Angeles Times’ food section and eventually launch his own business creating baked goods for culinary schools.
But the long hours eventually led Wing to rethink his career path. He went back to school to study international development at the London School of Economics, where in his dissertation he made the case for faith-based humanitarianism with the focus on the work of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. After seeing the church’s work up-close, he wanted to get involved.
“There was a creative side to me that I wanted to be able to use to help build the kingdom,” Wing said.
Opening the ‘floodgates’
Wing had never heard of RootsTech when, in 2015, he was tasked with helping plan the following year’s event. By then, the conference, which began in 2011 with about 3,000 attendees, had grown to nearly 25,000 people from 50 states and 40 countries. Over the years, Wing’s responsibilities expanded, and in 2019 he spearheaded the first international RootsTech in London, a city that felt like his “backyard” from his time studying there.
Then the world shut down with COVID, and along with it, RootsTech London.
Adapting the already massive family history event to a virtual format was a steep challenge.
“We tried to be as creative as we could to entice audiences from around the world,” Wing said. For the fully online 2021 event, the FamilySearch team built a platform to host the conference for free. The team expected a quarter million participants. More than a million joined online.
“We were shocked at how many people came that next year,” Wing recalled. The experiment was so successful that the team repeated it in 2022, focusing on perfecting the virtual experience.
Eventually, RootsTech settled into a hybrid model or “an online event, enhanced by an in-person experience.”
“What we did learn during those pandemic years was that we opened the floodgates of individuals around the world who were interested in the topic of family history, family discovery,” he said. “We recognize that there is a desire for people to connect to the stories of those who came before, and that we could not go back to what the event was pre-pandemic.”
In 2024, Wing stepped into the role of director of events at FamilySearch International, overseeing the event which continued growing every year.
Joshua Taylor, president of the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, has attended RootsTech from the beginning and has watched the event grapple with new topics in the industry from DNA testing to, more recently, artificial intelligence. RootsTech’s value is in convening both the creators of genealogy technology and the people who use it every day, Taylor said.
“It’s a great way for people to learn best practices and also learn new skills,” he said.
Like using AI to read and transcribe handwriting digitally, a technology that’s been a game-changer for family history, Taylor said.
“It saves hours and hours and hours of time, so people are able to access records that have always existed but have not been fully explored,” Taylor said.
This year, RootsTech is adding 500 new classes to its vast digital library of 3,500 offerings in over 40 languages, catering to both enthusiasts and seasoned genealogists. There are workshops on how to use large language models to correct transcripts, how to examine obituaries in newspaper collections and how to create family history books.
The event will also feature 10 “global emcees” broadcasting in multiple languages, including, for the first time, an emcee in American Sign Language.
More connected than we realize
Last summer, Wing and his wife, Emilia, took their five children to Canada, where both spent parts of their childhood. While in St. David’s, the family visited the branch Wing had attended as a child and reconnected with families he hadn’t seen for decades.
Over a Filipino meal, Wing’s children met their aunts, uncles and cousins for the first time. They shared memories, bringing Wing’s early years vividly back to life. Wing felt like his wife and his children saw him in different light, at ease in a place that was so formative to his identity.
After the visit, a line popped into his head: “Never mind the time and space between us.” The words became part of RootsTech’s theme song this year — “Where You Belong,” performed by Hanna Eyre, a Latter-day Saint and 2017 “The Voice” contestant.
Since 2022, Wing has written a theme song for every year of the conference. “Never mind the challenges before us, cause together we are stronger than you know. Never mind the thought that you were left here all alone. Cause it’s not how we were ever meant to be,” go the lyrics of this year’s theme song.
Over time, RootsTech became a source of personal discoveries for Wing.
When RootsTech launched a “Relatives at RootsTech” feature that made it possible to identify who you may be connected to at the conference, Wing repeatedly logged in to find zero connections. When his colleagues proudly shared their ancestral discoveries, he often felt left out.
“I wasn’t related to anyone and it just kind of validated this feeling that I had that: ‘See, I’m different, I’m not connected to anyone,’” Wing said.
But as more records were digitized, Wing’s family tree, and ties to other RootsTech attendees, also grew.
A woman he met at the conference helped him access his family’s Jiapu, traditional Chinese family records tracing ancestry back generations — 2,000 years in Wing’s case. By linking their family Jiapu to the larger tree on FamilySearch, he traced their lineage an additional 2,000 years.
“So a total of 4,000 years worth of meticulously documented records of individuals,” Wing said. “And that was so inspiring to me.”
His wife, who is from Poland, also found specialists who helped her locate records in her home country.
Once, logging into the FamilySearch app at the conference and expecting to see another zero, he saw that nine relatives were milling around somewhere in the vicinity.
“I don’t know how to describe that feeling,” Wing said. “I never anticipated that I would ever tap into that. And that changed me, because it made me realize that we’re a lot more connected than we realize. I started to feel, for the first time, that I was connected.”
