Every March, the Salt Palace Convention Center fills with people trying to find out who they came from. Hundreds of vendors, hundreds of sessions, keynotes from people you have heard of, an expo hall you cannot walk in a day, and a participation figure that runs into the millions once the online audience is counted.
It is the largest genealogy conference in the world, it is forty-five minutes from Provo, and a great many people in Utah Valley have never been — usually because they assume it costs money they do not want to spend on a hobby they are not sure they have.
Two of RootsTech's three tiers are free.
This page is what the conference actually is, what each tier costs, what a realistic day looks like, and how the family history infrastructure Utah Valley already has fits around it.
The three tiers, which is the thing to understand first
The in-person conference — paid. Three days at the Salt Palace. For 2026 the published pricing was $129 for all three days and $79 for a single day, with early-bird rates of $99 and $69 available when registration opened the previous September. That is the ticket that gets you the full run of sessions, the expo hall and the keynotes.
The online conference — free. Registration is required, but the price is zero, and it is the same conference streamed. This is not a consolation prize; it is deliberate policy, and it is the reason RootsTech's audience figures are enormous. Anybody, anywhere in the world, can attend.
Family Discovery Day — free, in person, on the Saturday. A free day at the Salt Palace built for families rather than researchers: games, activities across age groups, and a program aimed particularly at Latter-day Saint families with messages from Church leaders. No conference pass required.
The practical consequence for a Utah Valley household is simple and under-appreciated. You can attend a world-scale conference for the price of the petrol, by doing the free Saturday in person and the free stream for the sessions. If that turns out to be something your family enjoys, the paid ticket becomes an obvious decision the following year. If it does not, you have lost an afternoon.
What is actually in the building
The expo hall is the part that does not translate online and the part most people underuse. Hundreds of exhibitors: the big commercial databases, DNA testing companies, software makers, archives, national and regional genealogical societies, specialist researchers for particular countries and particular record types, book dealers, preservation services, and a long tail of small operators who do one specific thing extremely well.
The reason to be there in person is that all of those people are standing behind a table, in a good mood, with nothing to do but answer questions. A problem you have been stuck on for two years can be diagnosed in four minutes by somebody who has seen it three hundred times. That does not happen over a stream.
The sessions run from absolute beginner to specialist, across research methods, particular countries and record sets, DNA, technology, preservation and storytelling. There are far more than anybody can attend, which is a design feature rather than a flaw — it means whatever you are stuck on is probably addressed somewhere.
The keynotes are the mainstream draw and have in recent years included figures well outside genealogy, alongside the organization's own leadership. They are the part of the program that makes a general-interest news item out of a specialist conference, and they fill the largest hall in the building.
The help. This is the underrated part. There are people whose function is to sit with you and look at your actual tree, your actual dead end, your actual unreadable document.
Why this conference is in Salt Lake and not somewhere else
It is worth knowing, because it is not an accident of convention-center pricing.
RootsTech is run by FamilySearch, the family history organization of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and Salt Lake City is where the world's deepest collection of genealogical records has been gathered for the better part of a century. Family history is a doctrinal matter in this faith, and the scale of the effort that follows from that — the microfilming programs, the digitization, the record indexing done by volunteers in enormous numbers, the physical library downtown — produced an infrastructure no commercial operation would have built.
The result is that the global center of gravity for this subject sits an hour from your house. People fly in from other continents for the week. A significant share of the world's serious genealogists have made the trip to Salt Lake City at some point, and a lot of them plan it around March for exactly this reason.
That is the context for the thing Utah Valley residents most often miss: you are not attending a regional conference that happens to be nearby. You are local to the international one.
A realistic day, and how to not waste it
Here is the pattern that goes wrong, and it goes wrong for almost everybody the first time.
You arrive, you have a full schedule of eight or nine sessions, you attend six of them, you take notes you will never read, you walk the expo hall in the twenty minutes between two of them in a state of sensory overload, and you drive home tired with nothing you can act on.
The version that works is close to the opposite.
Write your problem down before you leave the house. One or two specific brick walls. A great-grandmother who appears from nowhere in 1891. A surname that changes spelling across a border. A document in a language you cannot read. This single step converts the expo hall from a spectacle into a resource, because now you have a question to ask three hundred people who want to answer it.
Pick two sessions. Not nine. Two sessions you will actually think about, with time between them. Three if one is a keynote you particularly want.
Spend the rest of the day in the hall. Talk to the specialist societies, which are the most useful and least glamorous tables in the building — a regional society for the county your family came from will know things no database contains. Talk to the DNA people if that is where you are stuck. Talk to the small vendors.
Take photographs of tables, not brochures. You will not carry the paper home and you will not read it if you do.
Eat before you go in. Convention center food at a full-house conference is the usual proposition.
What a genealogy conference is actually teaching you
It is worth being clear about what the skill is, because people arrive expecting a search engine and leave having learned something more like a craft.
Reading records rather than reading indexes. Most beginners work from transcribed indexes, which are searchable and wrong more often than anybody admits. Names get misread, dates get transposed, and a household gets split across two entries. The single biggest jump in most people's research comes when they stop trusting the index and start opening the image of the original document. Half the sessions at a conference like this are, underneath the topic title, about that.
Understanding why a record exists. Every document was created by somebody for a reason that had nothing to do with you. A census was a tax and representation exercise. A parish register was a sacramental record. A ship manifest was a liability document for a shipping company. Once you know why a record was made, you know what it is likely to be accurate about and what it is likely to fudge — and you know which other records were made at the same time by the same machinery.
Knowing what was destroyed. Whole categories of record do not exist because a courthouse burned, a war happened, or a government decided they were not worth keeping. An enormous amount of wasted effort goes into hunting for things that are simply gone. The people at the regional-society tables know exactly which of those apply to the county your family came from, and will tell you in one sentence.
Using DNA as evidence rather than as an answer. A test result is not a family tree. It is a set of probabilistic relationships that has to be reconciled with documents, and the reconciling is the work. This is the area where a beginner is most likely to reach a confident wrong conclusion on their own and most likely to be rescued by an hour with somebody who does it properly.
Writing it down so it survives you. The least glamorous and most important part. Research that lives only in one person's head, or in an undocumented online tree, is research that will be redone from scratch by a grandchild. Citation habits are boring to learn and are the difference between a hobby and a record.
Going from Utah County
By car it is about forty-five minutes from central Provo up I-15, and then you are looking for downtown parking in a convention week in March, which is the least pleasant part of the whole exercise.
FrontRunner is the better answer, and March is the month that makes the case most strongly: the weather is unreliable, the roads can be worse than the forecast, and the train does not care. Stations at Provo, Orem, Vineyard, American Fork and Lehi feed into Salt Lake Central, and the Salt Palace is a short walk or one light-rail stop from there. Our guide to FrontRunner from Provo covers fares and the timetable traps — the relevant one here being that the last southbound train is earlier than people expect.
If you are doing the free Saturday with children, the train is also the better experience. A family arriving at a convention center by train is having an outing; a family arriving after twenty minutes of circling a parking structure is having an argument.
What Utah Valley already has, the other eleven months
RootsTech is three days. The infrastructure around it is permanent, and a good deal of it is in this county.
Family history centers. There are centers across Utah Valley offering free, in-person access to subscription databases that cost real money at home, along with volunteers who will sit with you. This is the single most under-used free resource in the valley for this subject. Our guide to family history centers in Utah Valley covers where they are and what access each one actually gives you.
The libraries. County library systems carry genealogy collections and database access of their own, and our guide to Utah Valley's libraries sets out what each holds.
The industry. This is the part outsiders find surprising. Utah Valley is a genuine center of the family history technology business — a meaningful share of the world's genealogy software, data and services is built here, by people who live in this county. Our piece on the genealogy industry in Utah Valley explains how a doctrinal interest turned into an export sector.
The methods that are not FamilySearch. One organization is not the whole field, and a researcher who only uses one set of tools hits walls that other tools would have walked through. Our guide to family history beyond FamilySearch covers the alternatives and when each is the right one.
Who this is genuinely for, and who it is not
It is for you if you have a specific unanswered question about your family, if you have a box of photographs nobody can identify, if you have taken a DNA test and not known what to do with the results, or if you are simply curious and want a cheap Saturday that might turn into something.
It is for you if you have children and want them to meet the subject as a thing with games and activity tables rather than a thing adults do on a laptop. That is the entire design intent of the free Saturday.
It is not for you if you want a quiet archive experience. It is a convention: loud, crowded, commercial in parts, and exhausting by four in the afternoon. The Family History Library downtown is the quiet version and is open the rest of the year.
And it is not a substitute for doing the work. A conference gives you methods, tools and contacts. The research still happens afterwards, at a kitchen table, slowly. Everybody who comes home from RootsTech energized and does nothing for six months has had the standard experience. The people who get value out of it are the ones who booked two hours on the following Tuesday before they went.
Bringing somebody who does not care
A lot of Utah Valley households contain one person who is deeply interested in this and several who are not, and the question of whether to drag the others along is a real one.
Do not bring a reluctant adult to the paid conference. Three days of sessions is a lot to ask of somebody attending out of politeness, and the expo hall stops being interesting quickly if you have no question of your own.
Do bring children to the free Saturday. It is designed for exactly this, the activities are age-spread, and children respond to the subject far better when it arrives as a game than as a lecture. The thing that converts a child is almost never a database; it is a photograph of somebody who looks like them.
Bring a teenager if there is a hook. A specific ancestor with a story — a soldier, an emigrant, a scandal, somebody who crossed an ocean at fifteen — will hold a teenager's attention where an abstract interest in lineage will not. Find the hook first, then bring them.
Bring an elderly relative if they can manage the walking, and bring a recording device. The most valuable genealogical resource in most families is a person in their eighties who remembers names, and a conference is an unusually good setting for getting them talking, because everything around them is prompting the conversation. Be realistic about distances, though: a convention center is a long way from one end to the other and there is very little seating in the hall.
And consider going alone. It is a legitimate answer. A day at a conference on your own subject, with a written question and no one waiting on you, is a rare and productive thing.
The short version
Three days at the Salt Palace in early March. The in-person ticket runs around a hundred-odd dollars for three days, or under a hundred if you book early. The online conference is free. The Saturday is free in person. Write your brick wall down before you go, pick two sessions rather than nine, spend the rest of the day talking to people at tables, and take the train.
Related Guides
- Family history centers in Utah Valley — free database access and volunteers, all year
- Family history beyond FamilySearch — the other tools and when to use them
- The genealogy industry in Utah Valley — why this is built here
- Utah Valley's libraries — what each one holds
- FrontRunner from Provo — the car-free way north
- A Salt Lake City day trip from Provo
- Festivals and celebrations in Utah Valley
Dates, pricing and the program are set by FamilySearch and change every year, and early-bird windows close months in advance. Everything here was checked against the organizers' published information on 17 September 2026. Confirm at the conference's own site before you register.
Frequently Asked Questions
When and where is RootsTech?
What does it cost?
What is Family Discovery Day?
Is the free online version actually any good?
Is it worth going if I am a complete beginner?
How do I get there without parking downtown?
What is there in Utah Valley for family history the rest of the year?
How do I not waste the day?
