Re: how to recover contacts on rooted moto e
Login to Gmail online and check the contacts list. If you have been saving them to your Google (Gmail) account - and I *highly* recommend you do - they might still be there and you should be able to just resync them to the phone.
If you have been saving them to Google but now they are gone online also, this will restore them to any point they were at in the last 30 days:
https://support.Google.com/mail/answer/1069522?hi=en
If you did not save your contacts to Google and did not do manual backups, then sorry, but the contacts are gone.
Rooted or not has nothing to do with this.
Android since v1.0. Linux user since 2001.