When class started,
I asked them to each tell me a little bit about what family history experience
they had had. I wanted to gauge their experience level so that I could tell
what level of information would be most interesting and informative to them. (Some
had done indexing, a few had found names to take to the temple, some were good
at finding the green temple icons that indicated individuals who needed temple
work done.)
I started by having
them read Malachi 4:5-6. This is the scripture about how Elijah would come to
turn the hearts of the fathers to the children and the hearts of the children
to their fathers.
I asked them, what
that meant to them. They seemed to have a vague idea that it meant love.
To me, when hearts
are turned to each other across generations, there is a curiosity to know about
each other, a desire to help the other, to learn about, to connect somehow. I shared this with them, and then I showed a
video called “Family History: What I Found”.
[https://www.lds.org/youth/learn/ss/marriage-and-family/history?lang=eng#video=family-history-what-i-found]
This is a really
wonderful video on a number of different levels. (I didn’t explain past the
first point to the class, but I will to you.)
1) It shows the
process that one young man went through to learn more about his grandfather. He
was intrigued by a journal account about the war and what his grandfather hadn’t recorded. This led to all kinds
of research to try to understand what his grandfather went through and why he
hadn’t written anything a particular experience.
2) It shows (completely
without any explanation) a wide variety of different types of family history
documentation that we can look for. Only someone who had begun to do family history
would notice the nice mix of sources that had been carefully curated for this
film. If you were trying to figure out what to put in a personal history, you
could watch this movie with the sound off and take note of the types of
pictures, home movies, written accounts, and why they were each selected. If
you followed those examples, you’d have an excellent, efficient result, and your
descendants would probably be very happy.
3) It shows us tangible
objects that belonged to our progenitors become more meaningful when we learn
the stories behind them. For the narrator of that movie, it was his dead grandfather’s
gun that he saw in a picture and which he finally found after an exhaustive
search of the house.
To me, that movie
shows an example how our hearts begin to be turned to our fathers. We learn something
that intrigues us—like a narrative hole in an otherwise detailed account— then
we want to know more. (Sometimes the feeling of responsibility isn’t
automatically there, but curiosity will do just as well.)
At this point of the
lesson, I showed the class a belt buckle that belonged to my maternal grandfather,
J. Wallace McKnight. It’s square and has a dark blue stone. My Grandpa McKnight
liked gems and minerals, and he had a few belt buckles with interesting stones
on them. I like to wear that belt buckle sometimes, and it reminds me of him.
I showed them a
pearl necklace that I was wearing. My maternal grandmother, Barbara McKnight,
liked gems and minerals too, and she had collected those pearls, but never made
anything out of them. When I went through her household articles with my mom, I
chose those pearls, and I made a necklace out of them to remind me of my
Grandma.
(I also had a copy
of a big family history book that I could have showed the class, but I didn’t
get to that. If I’d had more time, I might have asked them if they or their
parents had anything that belonged to their grandparents or ancestors and asked
them to tell about those objects if they had.)
In the church, we
often think of family history work as pushing the boundaries at the edges of
our tree to find names to take to the temple, but it also involves documenting
and recording what we (or others) know about the family around us now so that
future generations beyond our lifetimes can know them too. (I wish I could have
made this point to my class, but I didn’t think to at the time.)
What got me into
family history research? It took a
while. I had a PAF file from my dad that I toyed with, but I never quite knew
what to do with it. I wondered where all those names and dates came from and
how I could know they were accurate. How did anyone add any information on to
their family tree?
Finally I decided to
take a class in family history. This was an act of faith for me. At the time
that I signed up for it, I didn’t want to do it because I knew it would make me work
hard on my family history, and I was
scared of it. But I knew Heavenly Father wanted me to learn how to do this
stuff, and I had hope that I would look back at the end of the class and be
glad I had done it. I had hope that I would be much less intimidated by the
prospect of doing family history if I had taken a class in it. (All those
things I hoped for, I was actually seeing with the eye of faith.)
The class I took was
actually through ASU, and it was a writing class. The class was “Writing Family
History Narratives,” taught by a certified genealogist. The big final project was to write a
narrative of every person in our 4-generation pedigree chart, including us. All
the assignments were geared toward collecting documents to use for the final
project. The narrative was to have citations from primary sources. During that
class, we learned about primary sources and interviewing and databases and searching
techniques. We learned about immigration and slave schedules and censuses and
church registrations and a heck-lot of stuff.
I bugged all my aunts and uncles for family history narratives and a
number of stories seemed to appear out of the woodwork that I hadn’t known
existed. I wrote my 4-generation narrative (duly cited), and then when the
class was over, I heaved a sigh of relief, and didn’t touch family history again
for another three or four years.
Then on a chance
visit to Familysearch, I noticed that the website had suddenly sprouted a way
to attach sources to people in our family tree. Suddenly all my knowledge about
sources could be applied in a way that could directly impact me and my family
members! I might not know enough to extend the branches to find new ancestors
yet, but by golly, I could document things with sources! I could attach the certificates and narratives
I had found, add pictures, and so forth. I could search for sources on
Familysearch and add them to individuals on my tree. So that’s what I did.
One major way that
my perspective about family history changed after taking that class was in the
amount of joy that I got from the research. Before I took that class, I felt like,
“If only I could find a name and take
it to the temple, I could feel the joy of family history.” But after taking the
class, I discovered that I could feel joy all along the way. Every time I find
a new source to attach to an individual on my family tree, I feel joy. (I feel
joy even if I’m adding sources to people who have already had temple work
done.) The more sources I find, the more joy I feel. When I find new people, I
feel joy. When I see an individual is ready to have temple work done for them, I
feel joy. When I take those names to the temple…I feel satisfaction. Do you see? I learned we can feel joy all along the way, not just at the end.
(I gave the youth a
very shortened version of the above story)
I told these stories
so that the youth could understand some of the roadblocks I dealt with in order
to get involved in family history. Roadblocks can be very similar, and I hoped
to inspire them to try different things.
I also felt like the
youth needed to do something to be active learners in this lesson, so I hit
upon the idea of having them try out the Familytree app.
Familytree is a
mobile app created by the Church, and it basically makes your family tree
accessible through your phone. It has a
tasks section that will aggregate a list together of people who need ordinances
(so you can reserve them), people who have record hints (so you can evaluate
the records and attach them if they match), people who are missing information
(so you can start your search there and hopefully find more records for
them). This app is a very useful thing. They make it possible to do simple family
history tasks ON YOUR PHONE!
The youth were
willing to try to download the Familytree app right there in class, but the
church’s wifi was too slow and they got stuck. (If I had been a regular teacher,
I think I would have called the students a few days ahead of time and asked
them to download the app at home and then we could do cool stuff in class.)
One feature of the
app that I didn’t expect was in the “more” section. It was called “Relatives
Around Me.” I had a hunch about what this would do, and in class, I tried it
out with one of the boys who had the app on his phone. We both went to that
section, gave permission for our trees to be shared with each other, and the
app calculated how he and I were related.
It turned out that we were 9th cousins, once removed! I could tell by how chatter erupted that the
class was fascinated by this.
They were all very
interested. Some were skeptical, but we could show them the line of ancestors
that went back and met at the top in one person. I challenged them to download
the app at home and play around with it to see what they could see and do with
it. (I also called their official teacher in the evening and told her what I
challenged them to do so she could follow up with them next week on this.)
At the end, I bore
testimony that they could have joy all along the way as they did family history
work, and that I knew it would protect them from the evils and temptations of
the world.
I believe that
family history takes a certain special brand of charity to do because you in
effect save people who you will never meet during your lifetime (except maybe
in a dream or vision or other highly spiritual experience) and who otherwise
won’t get a chance to thank you. That special kind of charity will refine us
and enable us to make good choices, even leading us to sacrifice
pleasures of the moment for the good of future generations yet unborn. We can save past
generations through family history and temple work, and we will be given the
strength to resist temptations and escape snares whose blighting effects would
reach down through generations of descendants.
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