Every family has a mystery: Unraveling the question marks at RootsTech 

Every family has at least one mystery. Some of those mysteries — why a grandfather disappeared one day, why a baby was put up for adoption six decades ago, why a woman might hide part of her identity all her adult life — can never be solved.

But thanks to advancing technology and a massive industry dedicated to learning about our genealogy, some questions, like our direct lineage, now have answers. As my family learned recently, though, some of those answers present new, more complicated mysteries.

This particular family mystery started with a late-afternoon phone call from a cousin. Growing up, this cousin and I were more like brothers, but these days we don’t talk nearly as often as we should, so when I saw his name on my phone I was excited to chat. As soon as I answered he got right to it: His teenage daughter had taken one of those spit-in-a-tube DNA ancestry tests and the results were pretty surprising.

He knew my wife and I had been researching family history recently. My mom applied for Irish citizenship a few years ago, before she died, and in the process of documenting our Irish heritage, my wife managed to trace my grandfather’s family back to County Clare. As a Christmas gift, my wife made a scrapbook chronicling the Mooney family roots back six generations, replete with birth certificates, death certificates, marriage records, census reports and ship manifests going back more than 150 years. All together, it’s a remarkable digest of dozens of lives lived in the clouded plume of history.

My grandparents had all passed before I was born, but I have memories of the stories my mom told me about our family growing up: like how her father’s mother died after falling from a fourth-story window when my grandfather was only 4, and how he and his siblings went to live with an aunt in a different part of New York City. My mom told me about her maternal grandmother, from Lithuania. I remember sitting on my mom’s bed as she’d pull out old black-and-white photos and point and tell me who each person was and how they were related to us.

At 7 or 10 or even 15 years old, though, these pictures just looked like blurry images from the distant past, strangers wearing strange clothing, leaning on old cars or sitting on funny-looking couches next to tinsel-laden Christmas trees. It made my mom happy to talk about all this so I indulged her, but at the time I would’ve rather been playing video games or knocking around a soccer ball. For so much of my life, stories about our family history were just … boring. Now that I’m older, I’d do anything to go back in time, to listen more attentively, to record her stories and the names of the people in those old photos.

It’s not clear when exactly this switch happened. Maybe it was turning 40, or having a kid of my own, or my mom dying a year ago, but now I crave this knowledge. I want to know everything I can about the people who came before me, and the people who came before them. What were their lives like? How did their voices sound? What did they dream of doing as adults — and did they accomplish what they hoped before their time on this planet ended?

We’re all walking, talking amalgamations of all the ancestors who came together to create us. We know we carry bits of those people: the way we raise an eyebrow, perhaps, or the color of our eyes and hair. We know our genetic code contains some of their illnesses, some of their predispositions, maybe even some of their mannerisms. But for the most part, we’ll never know which trait tracks back to which relative.

It’s not too hard to find historical documents about your not-too-distant ancestors. Thanks to meticulously collected census data, you can see when someone got on a boat and left their homeland or when your great-grandparents moved or what language was spoken in the home. Sometimes, on birth certificates and wedding records, you can even see a relative’s signature, often a beautiful, looping piece of evidence further confirming this person’s existence. But with each tiny scrap of detail, there are more unanswerable questions.

As more people are taking these tests and researching their families, more of us are facing even larger, potentially life-altering questions. Some people have discovered half siblings they never knew about, adoptions that had been secret, unknown second cousins living a block away. Some people are stunned by their ancestral breakdowns, learning that they might not even be the ethnicity they thought they were.

That’s sort of what happened when my cousin called me that afternoon and asked: “Do we have any Jewish relatives on our side of the family?”

Connecting everyone worldwide

Plenty of families are like mine: exploring their roots. Genealogy is one of the most popular hobbies in America. It’s also a massive business, expected to be an $8 billion industry globally by 2026, according to the Harvard Business Review. There are plenty of companies that promise to give you an ancestral breakdown by percentage or cast an extended genetic net for distant cousins.

Some screen your DNA for prominent health risks associated with your relatives.

A lot of people put together scrapbooks that track the family back a century or two. Some push it even further, digging into all manner of public records and microfilm and land deeds, relentlessly pursuing family histories back centuries. My wife has a relative who tracked their lineage back to the 1100s. Like most families, their story is a saga that includes wars, inexplicable violence and mass migrations.

Is this gigantic trend yet another manifestation of our shallow, self-obsessed culture? Sure, maybe. I think of it more like putting together a large puzzle or playing a classic video game. Every website that allows you to track your family history can give you hints, clues, a short list of people you might be related to for a variety of reasons. You can then look into each one — turning and trying your puzzle piece — and either discard them back to the heap of possibilities or add them to your family tree. Every breakthrough or found family member feels like advancing to a new level.

Genealogy is so popular that large swaths of society tune in to watch other people learn their family histories. The PBS show “Finding Your Roots,” in its 11th season, is all about celebrities learning the details of their extended genetic families. In each episode, professional genealogists research the ancestral histories and familial connections of an entertainer or politician and then, with subtle dramatic flair, host Henry Louis Gates Jr. presents someone like Ben Affleck or Viola Davis or Bernie Sanders with a compendium of the most intriguing elements of their family history — on camera.

We want people to discover their roots and connect with their family that they don’t know throughout the world.

Neil Patrick Harris learned he had an ancestor who was tried as a witch. Larry David learned that his mother was born with a name he’d never heard of. Julia Roberts and Edward Norton learned they’re distant cousins. Author George R.R. Martin learned that his grandmother likely had a secret affair that broke up her marriage, a plotline that could’ve come straight out of one of his fantasy novels.

The genealogy industry even has a trade show every year in Salt Lake City, a conference dedicated to highlighting the biggest technological trends and innovations. It started a decade and a half ago, and it’s grown as the industry has grown. RootsTech is a little like the Consumer Expo, but for family history. Dozens of vendors show up to display the newest advances in the coolest ways. Thousands of attendees roam the halls, ducking into ballrooms to watch a variety of talks on every aspect of the industry. Millions more watch the discussions online — for free. Last year, more than four million people tuned in from 232 countries.

This year they expect 10 million, Paul Nauta, the senior marketing and communications manager for FamilySearch International, the nonprofit that hosts RootsTech, told me.

“In this world of chaos and dissension, where people just seem to be drawn further and further away from each other, we’re trying to be a positive light,” Nauta said. “We want people to discover their roots and connect with their family that they don’t know throughout the world.”

The way Nauta describes it, the mission of FamilySearch International, which is funded by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is connecting everyone worldwide, in some larger way. The more we connect with our ancestors, the more we find mutual ancestors and end up connecting with each other. These grander connections — the realization that if you expand the net wide enough, we’re all just distant cousins — could be the solution to so many of society’s ills, like war and prejudice.

When you look at it like that, genealogy is a giant reminder that we all have more in common than we think.

“We want the world to have access to these connections and the heart-turning experiences for their family,” Nauta said. “The more you know about yourself and the more you know about your family, it changes how you see yourself and it gives you a legacy to live up to. That has a ripple effect and strengthens society as a whole.”

Nauta reiterated a point that connected with me and my family’s little mystery: “Knowing who you are,” he told me, “is so critical to having a healthy personal narrative and a healthy family narrative.”

The more I learned about RootsTech, the more I wanted to attend so I could see some of this for myself.

Piecing together the clues

Remember learning about the Holocaust and wondering why some people didn’t just say they weren’t Jewish? Well, plenty of people did exactly that. A lot of Jewish families fled Europe, not just in the lead-up to World War II, but in the decades preceding, too. Pogroms, organized violent attacks against Jewish people in Russia and Eastern Europe, sent a lot of families westward, often to the United States. Some of those families changed their names, and some decided to hide their Jewish roots, never telling anyone about their heritage or lives in the old country.

My family is about as Irish Catholic as it gets. My mom and her brothers went to Catholic school. My cousin and I were born in a Catholic hospital. Our extended family includes at least one cardinal and a few priests and nuns. Crucifixes and rosaries were a regular part of everyday life. But when my cousin asked about Jewish relatives, someone immediately came to mind.

I remembered my mom telling me stories about her maternal grandmother, who came to America from Lithuania during World War I. She lived with my mother and her parents for a few years when my mom was a kid. My great-grandmother’s maiden name was Helena Zukowska, which isn’t particularly Jewish, but now I wondered if maybe she’d hidden part of her identity once she got to the U.S. I know my mother didn’t think she had any Jewish heritage. She wouldn’t have been able to keep a secret like that — at least not from me. But maybe her grandmother could?

As I rolled all of this around in my mind, I felt a little like a TV detective, piecing together clues. My mom did have a family recipe for latkes, potato pancakes served with applesauce, traditionally prepared around Hanukkah. But she also had a recipe for corned beef and cabbage, a very Irish meal she’d sometimes make around St. Patrick’s Day. She also spoke some Yiddish, saying things like “Oy vey!” to express her mild dismay. But growing up, I assumed everyone in New York spoke some Yiddish.

I decided I needed to talk to someone who knew my great grandmother. I reached out to my only living aunt on that side of the family. She’s in her late 70s now and met my great-grandmother a few times when she was first dating my uncle. In fact, my great-grandmother died on their wedding day. (I can only imagine the drama and mixed emotions.) As soon as my aunt answered the phone, I felt the warm feeling of familiarity. I asked her about my great-grandmother.

My aunt told me that my great grandmother had a strong Eastern European accent that made her hard to understand, and that she lived with my mom’s family for a few years before moving in with other relatives near Syracuse, New York. There was never any mention of anyone being Jewish. My aunt was stunned at the prospect, actually. She suggested I call one of my mom’s cousins, likely the only other person in our family who spent time with my great-grandmother.

“The more you know about yourself and the more you know about your family, it changes how you see yourself and it gives you a legacy to live up to.”

My mom and her cousin Eleanor used to call each other every year on their grandmother’s birthday. When my great grandmother moved to Syracuse, she moved in with Eleanor’s family. So I called her to see what she thought about all of this.

As soon as she answered the phone, I got that warm feeling again. Her voice was soft and gentle and she called me “Sweetie.” She’s 76 and her memories of my great-grandmother were similar to my aunt’s.

“She had a bit of a drinking problem,” Eleanor told me. She remembers her ordering Congress, a New York lager, by the case. “She would open a beer in the morning, and she would pour it into this glass, and she would drink beer all day long.”

I wondered if maybe she drank so much because she was holding in a secret.

Eleanor told me she didn’t talk much about her life in Europe or coming to America. Sometimes she’d type letters to relatives there and then get typed or handwritten letters in return.

“I know the letters used to make her cry,” Eleanor told me. “She would read them over and over and over.”

I asked if she ever mentioned anything about being Jewish, or if anything about her seemed Jewish. Eleanor kind of laughed.

“No, no,” she said. “She was a devout Catholic. She went to ministry every Sunday. Her children were all baptized.”

While I didn’t get much further on the family mystery, it was nice talking with my mom’s cousin. We caught up on family stories and she told me about what life was like in New York in the 1950s. She reminded me of another time we’d talked, at a cousin’s wedding near Albany when I was about 15.

Eleanor also did a pitch-perfect impression of my mom that made me smile — and then tear up. We made plans to meet up sometime soon, so she can meet my son.

‘A global movement’

Walking into RootsTech this March felt a little like walking into Disney World, but instead of Disney characters and rides, all the thrills were genealogy-related. Thousands of lanyard-clad attendees from all over the country — and several other countries around the world — roamed the convention center hallways with backpacks and notepads. Many were professional genealogists who help customers research their own family histories for money. Plenty were dedicated amateur genealogists enamored with their own family mysteries.

Inside the expo hall, a bluegrass band belted out some delightful tunes. Behind them, there were gigantic interactive displays from all the biggest companies in the genealogy field: Ancestry built a model home replete with a fireplace; 23 and Me had a neon sign advertising their “Spit Bar”; and FamilySearch set up a two-story wooden tree with branches and glowing green loops that doubled as swings, symbolizing the family trees everyone was there to clarify.

There were dozens of booths in every direction. Some advertised useful tools for genealogists trying to unravel historical stories, including Newspapers.com, which has news stories and obituaries from hundreds of papers going back two centuries. Next to that one was Find a Grave, which has millions of cemetery records from all over the world. Some booths displayed products genealogists or their customers might want to purchase, including custom-made books full of family photos and documents, and dishes with prints of your family tree.

Several of the booths were interactive, including one that allows visitors to put on a headset and take a virtual reality tour of their own family tree. The Relatives at RootsTech booth enabled both live and virtual attendees to upload their trees to see how they were connected with the other participants watching on every continent except Antarctica.

Branching off the main hallway were a constant rotation of informational sessions covering everything from specific search techniques for finding Danish roots to a panel discussing the ethics of genealogical searches. Because I’m fascinated by criminal justice, I went to one talk all about using old court cases to flesh out family stories where I learned about legal databases I’d never heard of. I went to another all about finding and analyzing old obituaries, which doubled as a brief lesson on the history of the American newspaper business as literacy rates went up.

The subtle theme of many of these sessions was the proliferation of AI in wrangling and digitizing historical documents. Thousands of books, including old yearbooks and small-circulation journals from ethnic groups all over the world, have been digitized in just the last year alone, creating new databases that allow genealogists to joyously dig like kids at a sandbox.

Many of the sessions had live translators broadcasting in at least a dozen languages, including Spanish, German, Italian, Mandarin, Cantonese, Arabic, French, Portuguese, Korean and Japanese. It didn’t take long to realize that I wasn’t just at a trade show, I was at the fulcrum of a quickly changing international phenomenon. FamilySearch CEO Steve Rockwood probably put it best in a keynote address on the first morning.

“RootsTech isn’t just a conference,” he told a live audience of thousands and a virtual audience of millions. “It’s a global movement.”

My favorite presentation was probably one I attended on the second afternoon of the conference. CeCe Moore, one of the genealogical researchers on “Finding Your Roots,” walked the audience through her own journey trying to solve an old mystery in the family tree of the show’s host, Henry Louis Gates Jr. Gates’ family has long identified as African American, but a genetic test showed a substantial amount of white European ancestry, so Moore used just about every tool available to discover the identity of Gates’ great-great-great-grandfather — and a whole swath of ancestors he didn’t know he had. Moore, an absolute rock star in this world, ended the session with a sneak preview of an upcoming episode where she unravels this mystery for Gates on camera. The entire ordeal was incredibly dramatic.

Between sessions, I also talked with a lot of other attendees about what drew them to Rootstech. Plenty of people come every year, giving the event a bit of a family-reunion feel. Some come to get an early glimpse at the newest tools and technology in the industry. One man in his 40s told me he was adopted as a baby and over the last few years he’s pieced together two separate family histories. “It’s nice to see that I have a place in two different family trees,” he told me. A woman from New York told me she came because she’d hit a roadblock tracing her family roots back to Africa and needed help — and maybe some brainstorming — from people with more experience.

In the end, most of the people I spoke with came for one big reason: They simply enjoy connecting with other people who are interested in the ways we’re all connected to one another.

Some answers, more questions

Through RootsTech, I met Todd Knowles, one of the world’s foremost experts in Eastern European Jewish genealogy. He agreed to help me in my search to understand who in my family was Jewish. It didn’t take him long to build a family tree for that side of my family and suddenly he could show me the names and birthdays and death dates for several generations. There was my mom and her brothers, then my grandparents, then my great-grandparents, then their parents.

“There’s a lot of Polish and Russian,” he told me. “Maybe a little German.” He said he couldn’t immediately identify who might have been Jewish, but he had some ideas. “As you’re doing a family tree, it’s not always cut and dried, going in a straight line. Sometimes you’ve got to go with a side route.”

I’d heard the same thing at RootsTech. When you can’t find documents for the person you’re researching, you might try that person’s siblings. You might search multiple addresses.

He pulled up an image of a passenger list for the ship SS Pretoria, a German transatlantic liner that arrived in New York on June 27, 1908. On that ship was my 17-year-old great-great-grandfather, Helena Zukowska’s father. Like almost every other male on that side of the family, his name was Francis and he went by Frank.

“This is a return trip from Europe,” Knowles told me. “He was born in New York and at some point went back to Europe, then came back to the U.S.” The document has him listed as Russian, but then that’s crossed out. “Because he was born in the U.S.” He was five-foot-seven, with a fair complexion, light brown hair and conclusion: I have a lot more research to do. brown eyes. It also says he paid for his own passage. The ticket cost $25. He told immigration agents he was going to Brooklyn, to live with his brother Louis.

While some of the passengers on the ship listed their race as Hebrew, he didn’t list a race. Some passengers specifically say they’re Lithuanian, but not him. So why did he go back to Europe, and then why did he return to America? His family’s name was Fischer, which could very well be Jewish, but at some points the family uses the last name Miller — though it’s not clear why. It was just mysteries inside mysteries inside mysteries, like a Russian doll of family secrets.

“Every time I step around a corner,” Todd told me, “it seems to raise new questions.”

There’s no record of Frank’s mother coming to the U.S., but in a 1930 census, she was living with Louis in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn — just a few blocks from where a friend of mine lives now. On this census, the family says they’re from Germany and Poland, not Russia. The census also lists how much money each family had at the time. While several of their neighbors had in excess of $10,000, Louis’ family had a total of $35. Several of their neighbors reported their primary language as Yiddish, but my family listed their predominant language as Polish.

We discussed these clues like detectives chewing over a big case.

“That sounds like somebody who decided they’re not Jewish, right?” I said.

“It’s like they’re at least going out of their way to hide it,” Knowles said.

In the very least, it looks like my mom’s cousin Eleanor was right: Despite her family living in a mostly Jewish neighborhood, my great-grandmother almost certainly grew up Catholic and likely didn’t know about her own Jewish heritage. My grandmother and mom wouldn’t have known either.

Knowles explained that the question of Jewishness is further complicated by the act that for years, even Jewish marriage and birth certificates in Poland were recorded in Catholic churches, because that was the national religion of Poland at the time.

This part of Europe also changed hands many times throughout the last two centuries. Parts of Poland became Lithuania. Then Russia. Some areas were considered Ukrainian. And some of these national boundaries are still changing today. I took a class in Eastern European history in college and I still struggle to keep it all straight.

“Knowing who you are is so critical to having a healthy personal narrative and a healthy family narrative.”

As Knowles explained to me what he’d found, it felt a little like I was on an episode of “Finding Your Roots.” In between revelations about my own family, I was also learning about the neighbors they had in Brooklyn. While most of the people were Jewish, there were also families from Ireland, Sweden, Italy and Canada.

“What a great place it would’ve been to grow up,” he noted.

After a few days of research, we had some answers, but even more questions. That’s part of the joy — and occasional misery — of learning your family history. Genealogy allows us to escape into an incredibly personal mystery. But unlike the mysteries we see on TV, the answers might mean new insights into long gone relatives or new family you didn’t know you had. It can also mean more time spent talking with the family you do know, whether that’s a cousin who’s more like a brother, an aunt you’ll always remember fondly, or an extended cousin whose stories are warm and sweet and remind you of your mother. The resolutions aren’t always as clear as we’d hope, but that’s partly what keeps drawing us back.

Understanding my past has helped me understand myself. And now that I have a child of my own, it’s taken on even more resonance, and urgency. We all are part of a story, one that connects past generations, and I’m hoping that the more I piece together my family history, the more my son will understand where he came from, and the broader story to which he belongs.

As for my own family mystery? After talking with my relatives and going to RootsTech and going back through time looking at all the documents Knowles discovered, I came to a simple conclusion: I have a lot more research to do.

This story appears in the April 2025 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.