RootsTech 2025 has announced the first four keynote speakers for next year’s event.
The global family history gathering — scheduled for March 6-8, 2025, with an in-person event in Salt Lake City, Utah, and available in multiple languages online at RootsTech.org — will feature the following keynote speakers, according to a Dec. 4 news release:
- Olympic gold medalist Tara Davis-Woodhall and Paralympic gold medalist Hunter Woodhall, track and field athletes who are married.
- Ndaba Mandela, the grandson of the late Nelson Mandela, speaker, writer and philanthropist.
- Dana Tanamachi, an artist.
The Woodhalls
Last summer, the Woodhalls made history in Paris by becoming the first husband and wife to both win gold at the Olympics and Paralympics in the same Summer Games.
As a member of Team USA’s Olympic track and field team, Tara Davis-Woodhall won the gold for her mark of 7.10 meters in the women’s long jump event.
A few weeks later during the Paralympics, Hunter Woodhall, who was born with fibular hemimelia and is a double amputee, won the men’s 400-meter T62 final to earn his gold medal.
Images of their celebratory hugs went viral on social media, endearing them to fans around the world.
The couple first met when they were in high school at a 2017 track and field event in Pocatello, Idaho.
Hunter Woodhall was from Syracuse, Utah, and Tara Davis-Woodhall, lived in Agoura Hills, California.
The story goes that Tara saw Hunter win the boys’ 400-meter race and felt compelled to give him a hug. Afterwards, Hunter told his friend he had just met the girl he was going to marry.
After high school, she competed at the University of Georgia before transferring to the University of Texas.
He competed at the University of Arkansas as the first double amputee to receive a Division I scholarship. The couple maintained a long-distance relationship through phone calls and social media while achieving success in track and field.
She was an NCAA champion in both the indoor and outdoor long jump and competed in the Tokyo 2020 Olympics.
He achieved All-American honors and went on to win bronze in the Men’s 400M T62 event at the Tokyo 2020 Paralympics.
The couple married in 2022. Read more about the Woodhalls in the FamilySearch blog.
“We’re at the track together, keeping each other accountable and making sure that we get everything in (that) we need,” Hunter Woodhall told the Deseret News. “It’s like having the best accountability partner ever right in your corner and then also someone who understands the sacrifice, time and commitment it takes to compete at this level.”
The Woodhalls will share their story with RootsTech on Saturday, March 8, available to watch in person or online.
Ndaba Mandela
Nelson Mandela was a South African anti-apartheid revolutionary who served as the first black president of South Africa from 1994 to 1999. Prior to his presidency, he spent 27 years in prison for his activism against the oppressive apartheid regime, emerging as a symbol of resilience and reconciliation. Mandela’s leadership and commitment to peace and social justice earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993, and he remains an iconic figure in the struggle for human rights worldwide.
Nelson Madela’s grandson, Ndaba Mandela, an accomplished speaker, writer and philanthropist, is striving to carry on his grandfather’s legacy.
He grew up in South Africa when apartheid was still active. He lost both his mother and father in his youth and was invited to live with his grandfather for several years. He learned many valuable lessons and published a memoir in 2018, “Going to the Mountain: Life Lessons from my Grandfather, Nelson Mandela.”
In the book, he writes that his grandfather was his “protector” and helped him achieve a better life, despite being difficult to grow up with. “My grandfather ... helped me reclaim a different vision of the world and my place in it,” he wrote, according to a 2019 news article.
In 2010, Mandela the younger helped found the Africa Rising Foundation, an organization dedicated to providing African youth with opportunities to further their education and prepare for leadership roles. When speaking, he champions the power of education, empowering the youth, resilience and perseverance, and global citizenship.
His RootsTech keynote message will be virtual only starting Thursday, March 6, and focus on the multi-generational story of the Mandela family, according to a FamilySearch blog post.
Dana Tanamachi
In 2009, Dana Tanamachi was helping decorate for a party when her friend handed her a piece of chalk and invited her to write something on a chalkboard wall that emphasized the party theme, “The Great Gatsby.”
Tanamachi began creating and her everyone at the party was taken with her art. Many took photos and posted the images on social media. Soon people and businesses were hiring her to create similar artwork.
Although initially reluctant to promote her own work, over the next five years she advanced from being referred to as “Chalk Girl” to “Chalk Queen,” according to a FamilySearch blog post.
Tanamachi’s artwork expanded to creating labels, wrappings, bags, book jackets, posters and more. Today she does work for companies such as Nike, Google, Target and Starbucks.
“Every new commission utterly shocked and humbled me,” she said. “I’m not kidding. I honestly couldn’t believe people were paying me to do this.”
Throughout her life, Tanamachi has found comfort and strength in the Japanese concept of “gaman,” which means “enduring the seemingly unbearable with patience and dignity.”
When her Japanese-American great-grandparents were both 19 years old, their families were forced to leave homes in California and relocate to an internment camp in the desert during World War II. Despite the difficult living conditions and unknown duration of their stay, her great-grandparents found peace and inspiration in using whatever material they could find — scraps of paper, random chunks of wood, pieces of plastic meant for the trash — to create art.
Tanamachi sees “gaman” in what they made, and it has inspired her own work, especially during challenging times in her life.
Her art has been featured on the covers of O Magazine, Time Magazine and even on a U.S. postal stamp. In 2022, she hand-painted a three-story mural at the Starbucks inside the Empire State Building. She is credited with more than 500 hand-lettered gold ink illustrations for the ESV Illuminated Bible, a modern take on the illuminated Bibles of the Middle Ages.
Attendees can find her keynote message online or in person on Friday, March, 7.
Learn more about Tanamachi by visiting her website, tanamachistudio.com.
RootsTech 2025
RootsTech is a three-day global online and in-person family celebration conference hosted by FamilySearch International, which is sponsored by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and other leading genealogy organizations. It is the world’s largest genealogy event, featuring keynote speakers, hundreds of classes and new technologies.
Registration for RootsTech 2025 is available at RootsTech.org.
