Monday, January 30, 2012

Last night we had our youth family history fireside. About  8 -10 youth were present and maybe a dozen adults. A good start.
I tried to keep my presentation very simple - targeted at those who had no knowledge of finding names and processing them through NewFamily Search. We had some advanced questions, but it seemed to work ok. Think I'll make a very short survey for those who attended - see what they got from it.
We had an intro, good story from our new family history consultant. He was adopted at 2 and 1/2 years old from an orphanage in Germany. Did not know about his birth parents. One day last year he sat next to a man on a plane that was from the town were the orphanage was located.The man's brother (think I'm getting this right, or close anyway) worked with German government records for 30 years and loves to do research. Soon our brother received information about his birth family, including a family tree of 4700 names!
Next I did my presentation with a projector & laptop. We went live to the lds youth website, youth & family history pages, and through the 5 steps on the Discover page - how to prepare a name for temple work. I finished with the 'serving others' video to help create a vision for the young people on how helpful they could become to those who are not computer literate.
Then our good Bishop closed. A few hours before the fireside he created a fan (link is on youth family history web page). He was surprised to see the empty places in the 9 generation chart, thinking that all the work had been done. (He is a 4th generation bishop!) He and his youngest daughter identified a great aunt (?) who never had children, and had no work done for her. They are preparing her name for the temple.
I am thrilled to be engaged in this work. If we can assist just few people to prepare their ancester's names for temple work today, think of the significance through time. Once folks get started they will gain the skills & understanding needed to continue, and to help others. It's fun!

6 comments:

Andrew Kenneth Porter said...

My grandpa and I have been working on our family history for years. I've been baptized for hundreds of names.

Nicolie said...

Finally figured out how to blog.
Want cake :)

Kimberly Brockhausen said...

My moms bapzied like millions of names... :) LOOOVVVVVEEE YYYYYOOOOUUU!!!!!!! <3 :)

Julie said...

I was very grateful for your fireside. Some of my family names were already done when I finally got around to entering them. I was inspired all over again to work on it, & the best part of all is that I am helping my mom get all of the information into the computer...all of her personal notes, etc. 33 ancestors so far need to be
baptised. Others need to be sealed. We will be busy! I loved doing this!
Thanks for all you do.

Nathan Mayo said...

Found out we have a bunch if people on my moms side who haven't had work done! And somebody traced one of the lines back to the year like 960! Awesome!!

Joshua Mayo said...

My family, my home teacher and I went on to new family search and have already found enough names for my brother and I and even more. Some random person that my mom found online has already traced our family line back to about 960 AD. How cool.