Latter-day Saint apostle Jeffrey R. Holland wasn’t publicly advertised as a speaker at RootsTech 2025, yet he appeared on the event’s main stage Saturday afternoon in the Salt Palace Convention Center, along with fellow apostle Neil L. Andersen and his wife, Kathy Andersen.
Neil Andersen explained he didn’t know Holland would be available until Wednesday, and he begged the acting president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to join him and his wife.
Holland had a different recounting.
He said he “wandered over for a hot dog and some cotton candy.”
“And I’m here on the stage with my friends,” Holland quipped. “Don’t let Elder Andersen try to sell you anything.”
The afternoon marked the last day of RootsTech 2025, an annual conference hosted by FamilySearch, the genealogical research arm of the global faith of 17.2 million members.
Through a combination of real-time remarks and prerecorded videos, the three church leaders shared how family history research and Latter-day Saint temple work have touched their lives and brought them closer to their loved ones.
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Latter-day Saint apostles Jeffrey Holland, left, and Neil Andersen at the RootsTech conference in Salt Lake City on Saturday, March 8, 2025.
“I’ve had a wonderful life, I’ve had a blessed life,” the 84-year-old Holland said, as he noted that the world and the church in 2025 look dramatically different from when he was born in 1940. “We are moving. The work is hastening. We have to add what we know. That’s all we have to do, and we bless everybody in the process.”
Holland — who has suffered a series of health setbacks including a near-death experience in 2023, also noted that his time “is nearly gone.”
Just as he surprised conference attendees by appearing on stage, Neil Andersen had a surprise for his senior church leader.
“We were able, in these three days, to add one of our favorite videos of your own family history,” Andersen said.
“You’re kidding,” Holland answered. “Don’t show it!”
“I’m going to disobey my quorum president. Watch,” Andersen said to laughter.
The video, titled “Good Things to Come,” was released on the church’s YouTube page in 2010 and depicts a story Holland shared in a 1999 General Conference address in which he spoke about how he, his wife and their kids set out on a 2,600-mile trek across the country from southern Utah 30 years before in an old car.
According to Holland, they made it 34 miles on the highway before “their beleaguered car erupted.”
He walked about three miles to Kanarraville for help, found a man who gave him some water and eventually brought the car to a mechanic, where they could find no immediate issues.
So the family members resumed their journey. But “in exactly the same amount of elapsed time at exactly the same location … the car exploded again.”
Holland walked the same route to the same man, who again offered him water and a ride back to the broken-down vehicle.
“‘You might make that trip, and your wife and those two little kiddies might make that trip, but none of you are going to make it in that car,’” Holland remembered the man saying. “He proved to be prophetic on all counts.”
Upon the video’s end, Holland said he couldn’t watch it or anything related to family history without thinking of his wife, Patricia Terry Holland, who died in July 2023.
“My wife gave me everything,” he said. “She didn’t just give me something. She didn’t just give me that trip to New Haven, Connecticut. She didn’t just work while I went to school to get a degree. She didn’t just give me those children and now grandchildren and finally great-grandchildren, she has given me everything.”
And that legacy is, in essence, family history.
(The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) Patricia T. Holland and her husband, apostle Jeffrey R. Holland, share their experience visiting with refugees in Hannover, Germany, in 2022.
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) The RootsTech conference in Salt Lake City on Saturday, March 8, 2025.
