Two years ago, I made a book about my Grandpa Elder’s ancestors to give to my family for Christmas. I was inspired by William R. Walker’s talk in the April 2014 General Conference about learning stories of faith of our ancestors. I knew some of the conversion stories of my Mormon pioneer forefathers, but not all. I determined to find and compile all the stories and records about my LDS ancestors’ faith. One repository that...
Are you the lucky recipient of your family’s genealogy? Do you have a box, a barrel, or, in my instance, a suitcase full of letters, documents, photos, family group sheets, etc? You are probably feeling overwhelmed with either joy or despair. Go ahead and be ecstatic that you inherited priceless stuff. Don’t despair because I’m going to show you how to take care of your papers, one step at a time. When I started...
According to D. Joshua Taylor at the Green Valley (AZ) Genealogical Society seminar yesterday, the stereotypical genealogist is a 65 year old white female. He learned this when he dedicated a separate web browser for his genealogy google searches only. Google built a profile based on these searches to target him for advertisements. He found out from friends at google that google thought he was a 65 year old white female. We got a...
Have you tried the fun little website called Grandma’s Pie? If so, you might be wondering how I changed the pie chart it generated for me from the orange color scheme into this blue one: In this post, I’ll show you how. First, for everyone who hasn’t seen Grandma’s Pie before, here’s a little introduction. When I was in high school, I thought it would be interesting to make a list of all the native countries of...
Our ward Christmas party was a nativity display. We decided to create a family history display in one of the rooms with Christmas family traditions and ideas from the FamilySearch Christmas campaign, 5 Ideas for Creating Cherished Memories this Christmas Season. The second idea on the list was to create ancestor photo ornaments, so I decorated a small Christmas tree with a bunch of photo ornaments. There are a lot of ways to make photo ornaments,...
Need a way to involve your youth family history consultants? How about introducing family history to children from three to eleven? We combined both of these objectives with a Primary Sharing Time! In The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the organization for children age three to eleven is called Primary. As part of our Sunday worship, the children have classes for their individual age groups then come together for Sharing Time. Sharing time...
Do you have pioneer ancestors who joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) in the 1800’s and came west to join the saints in Zion? The LDS church began emphasizing family history about 1890, so you may think that those branches of your family tree are complete and accurate. Just looking at your fan chart on FamilySearch’s Family Tree, it might seem that there are no more family members to discover. In...
Our stake has been focused on teaching the primary children ages 8-11 how to do family history, and our youth consultants are taking charge of teaching them. So I created a lesson plan for our youth family history consultants to use as they teach at the children’s homes. The lesson invites the children to become explorers and discover their family’s past. Four tools from an “explorer’s backpack” are used to explain family history concepts. The...
Our ward is working on a temple challenge to find a family name for temple work by the end of November. I think it’s important to talk about the difference between searching for a name and surfing for a name. Searching: Finding records that reveal relatives not yet in Family Tree. Adding them to the tree, checking for duplicates, and reserving their ordinances. Surfing: Clicking around family tree until you find a relative with a green temple icon,...
Not sure what to do with the Family Search Partners that now appear on the Person page of Family Search? Have you clicked on one of them for fun and been completely overwhelmed with the amount of information you see? Or were you underwhelmed with the lack of relevant information returned? Because of FamilySearch’s partnership with Ancestry, Find My past, and MyHeritage, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have access to free LDS...