Family History Discussion (Scott and Angelle Anderson Live)

we're so thrilled to be here with you again on wednesdays here on facebook and youtube so welcome to all of our guests and we are delight we i am delighted to be joined by the andersons and so i would love for you guys to introduce yourself and we are going to talk today it's a little bit of a continuation of last week and we're going to talk about families and getting people interested in family history and ways to do things together and um so we'd love to hear your ideas those of you that are watching and let us know where you're watching from um the andersons are in bluffdale i'm downtown salt lake city and just want to extend a warm welcome to our global family search family welcome everyone yes we're so glad you're here tell us about you and tell us about your family and then what you do great so i'm scott and i'm angel angel and scott angel on what you're seeing right there which is a story that we might get to today i'm called angel my real name is angel okay angel when i'm really really good every day every day this is great okay it's already exciting um so tell us a little bit about your family and then you know what you do yes well we happen to have seven children and 34 grandchildren and right now most of women is that a lot great i'm kind of jealous i have zero so i i need to borrow some maybe any time most of them live with us at the present time because okay we've been so excited kids have our son downstairs with his family our daughter living upstairs with us and at the present time our other daughter's house is being remodeled so they moved in for a few days so that's why they got her that's why we're not at our house right now you're like hiding okay so tell us what you do and why you like why you love family history so much oh that'd be so fun we do love family history a lot my kids call me grandma camera that's a compliment grab my camera that's awesome until you have to buy the the next four terabyte absolutely put all yeah we were at one of our children's houses that lives out of state and our granddaughter got a call from another cousin of hers who lived in another state and when she found out that grandma was visiting grandma camera was there she said oh well what kind of family history are you working on she knew something to me we do drive them crazy with it but they love it too that's good and so like um tell us a little bit about family history guide and what you do with them and for those of us awesome i would just say quickly she got this passion for family history a while ago she decided to become a certified family historian i've never seen anybody work so hard and study so much and do online classes until she qualified and people kept asking her why and she said i don't know i just love it i just want to help people i just want to do it so you want to hire up no i don't do that i just want to help people i just want to do it so she's had this passion for it and trained a lot to do it and because of that she has like 16 facebook pages that all have to do with family history i mean they're all over the place all kinds of things so she was in the midst of doing all that and some wonderful people from something called the family history guide saw her work and said we would love you to contribute she did for a little while then they said we would love you to be on the management team because you have so much to offer and that's kind of how it got started angela tell you a little about how that whole thing got started the family yes take it away yeah it was it's kind of a miracle really um bob ives and bob taylor um or two they're they're family history enthusiasts but um i think i like to call them enthusiasm enthusiastically enthusiastically sounds good they love it that's her i'm enthusiastic anyway um so they were helping people a lot with family history because they wanted to they they love it and they wanted to to make it easier for people so because they were asked the same kind of questions over and over again they decided to start a little site okay and that was called the family history guide and that was about five years ago and in fact they said their birthday this year yes they did happy birthday family history guide and basically it is to help anybody anywhere with any anything they want to do with family history the fun thing about it is it has step-by-step specific instructions for like everything on family search i learned how to do anything in family search it'll lead right to family search to help support it's a support and a strength to your site what a what a blessing it is to have people say well this is what i want to do i'm not sure exactly how to do it and they can get step-by-step instructions even with exercises and guidelines about exactly what to do and hot links to go right to family search so it'll take you right okay how do i merge or how do i put this memory on then you click it and boom you're right there memories or boom you're right there emerging and so it it is a wonderful instructive tool oh well we we appreciate until she became a part of it that's kind of what i mean the discovery center because uh she put on over 200 activities on there the discovery based activities wow those are linked to some instruction about how to do those activities and how to teach them more about family history so that stuff is just delightfully fun because we learn by doing right yes we learn by doing i just want to recognize we've got um so many people joining us today and i'm seeing minnesota and kansas minnesota so many and we've got karen green she's one of our favorites um so we love karen green and we're happy and we've got michigan so everyone who's watching we're so thrilled that you're here joining me then wendy from family search and the andersons and we're going to talk a little bit about the family history guide and getting you know families involved and this is a continuation of what we did last week i think so many of us that love family history were also a little sensitive to not being that person that is like you know always talking about family history and and and people lose interest right so we don't want to do that we want to bring people together and engage them and build connections and so that's really what we're going to dive into today and talk about and so there's links to the family history guide in the chat and as the anderson share information will match it with the um the chat links in there and so if you have questions for the andersons let us know we'll we'll try to get to some of them at the end but i think one of the things i want to start off with is how do you make family history part of your daily life you know and is i think you can make any activity into a family history activity pretty much you can just turn it around and start talking about relatives sharing stories creating information i think one thing too is to um surround yourself with family history at home pictures and memorabilia ouch not just hidden in the closet or hidden on the computer display right exactly is there something at your home that is displayed that all of your grandkids love like if i were to ask them you know what is a family history artifact that is in your home what do you think they would pick which artifact is not family history that's what they'd say years now whenever the kids want to give us something for christmas they give us something that relates somehow to the family but i think the challenge is wendy don't you that some people when they think family history have a fairly structured view of what it is i think it's like okay that's what we do when we go research a name and spend a lot of time trying to find somebody in a date and a fact and look up well that's great but you notice that last week michael said three to eight percent of people are really good at the research part yeah there's so much more to it that everybody can do and that part of it is in the total flow of life where you just share stories and there's so many little fun ways i mean we used to have a guest to dinner all the time and we'd sit at the dinner table and the kids would be there and they've asked 20 questions to try to figure out who it was and they'd find out as one of our relatives who would be sharing fun stories about who they were so many of those kinds of fun consistent activities she is really good at at the moment sharing something when she's in the car or oh in the car you've got a cabinet time fillers family history time fuller so you know but like we're just on um our we went to our family reunion in southern utah different times the day or the week we were with different children in different cars and we just played 20 questions i'm thinking of an ancestor who and it was amazing what stories they do remember if you keep consistently sharing those um then you can do like scots are the 20 questions um family history stories with a twist like each person telling part of the story yes i like that idea mark luke john you know that one just testers names pictionary writing letters to you know you can just and i would suggest probably making your own list things that will just maybe on your phone um things that you can do anytime anywhere to just bring that spirit of family history into yours whatever it is i love it will you guys show us a little bit uh will you show us the website and kind of where people can find some of these activities um absolutely i think that everyone will really appreciate that and um just just appreciating people who are watching and joining as we're talking yeah yeah take it away and show us just a little bit about navigating the website and where people can go to find these activities i love your idea of like picking ones that you think would be fun and engaging and creating a list somewhere okay yeah i can see this so go ahead and just give us a little bit see at the top there family search is there ancestry my heritage find my past so each of those has step-by-step instructions and also instructions about how they work with each other so sometimes you're in family search and you want to get a little hint from ancestry it shows you exactly how to use the other sites and that they will come help um we have a country's page it goes to all the countries this is specifically research oriented but it shows you all the different research areas and lots of details about each country and that's really been a lot of fun you can go to any specific location and say here's the best collection of places that you can go to find names like here's england at the bottom you'll see they're all the counties in england wow any county it'll show you all the details about that particular county and where you can find records see at the top here's lincolnshire and across the top there are archives vital records church and cemetery records probate records maps so there's all that kind of stuff to help with those kind of things that none of us are expert at what we want to do anyway right help us with that okay this has really helped in the activities part um people are appreciating that and um let me ask you this question what do people come to the family history guide for mainly you know is there something that everyone is trying to learn give us the secrets i think they go just for general help like how do i get started so for example you can go to the get started here and it has some some just an overview of different things like basics you can learn how to use a computer on the family history guide wow activities how to um explore photos and documents what's some family search and how do i find that what's already there and it's completely free everything on the family is everything is free yeah out of the goodness of their hearts these two guys that started it and they have a wonderful team you can read all about them in in the intro on the history guide and you know they just kept going because they do love it and they all donate their time we all donate all our time to this just to help people wow and we have such amazing volunteers at family search so this is so true within this community people just love it so much that they want to help others and i think that's really really a wonderful thing yep the enthusiastics right the academic section is really fun because it's broken into four major categories okay yeah this is what we're here to talk about show us the activities yeah so it says there's a family section that has all kinds of ideas in and within the family section for example let's just go there for a second okay so activities there you family so you can see at the top um all the tabs here you can have anytime activities plan ahead making family history documenting the past all those kinds of things all right so the categories like anytime you don't have any preparation at all you just open it up and do it it's something you could do and then there are lots of different kinds of activities a lot of them have videos that show you a family doing it like the family history fun basket um they'll put that link in the comments for you but all of these videos are on the family historyguide youtube channel and all of the activities that you see that are marked with an asterisk take little or no prep oh that's important roll them together for example the family history fun basket what did you put anything you want to talk about do you want to talk about ancestors you want to talk about storytelling do you want to talk about any experiences you've had or whatever you just put these little slips of paper into a basket and draw them out how simple is that and we do this yes we've had so much fun in fact we were doing this one day with some of our friends a bunch of our associates and one of them pulled out a little slip that said tell us somebody you really admire and a characteristic you admire about them from your family and he talked about his great great grandfather who was the very person that mine that met my great-great-grandfather and influenced his life forever and i had no idea this friend of mine from 30 years related to the man that changed our family's life and it was so fun it's just so fun we've done in groups of 400 people where we've done it we've done it in groups of small groups so it's a really a lot of these activities are just delightfully flexible right one of them like we said earlier they go back and say okay if you need help doing any part of this here's where it is in the film history guide and then there also are blog posts like this one particularly on the family history fun desk it gives you ideas of what to put into the basket okay and you can do it without internet which is kind of nice or you can do it with internet yeah that's a great um option for people that are sort of on the go how many different activities do you have on the family history guide do you have any idea how many yeah how many yeah over 200 over 200 and it gets more all the time so you never have to be bored in your whole life ever that's important um their individual activities and then their activities for youth which one of our great goals is to try to help you get involved in this amazing activity you know the bruce feiler story um his research that says if a child knows something about his family including just grandpa and grandma where they met details about family simple things that they would find out only from a family member they know that improves their ability to be able to handle stress it improves their self-esteem it gives them the capacity to be able to deal with challenging situations all those kinds of things we want to have the youth be able to receive so we have a whole section on here about youth and we've worked quite a bit with youth we'll talk more about that how we can get youth involved and they're all series of youth activities here and you know with 34 grandkids we get a lot of practice oh my goodness and let me tell you that um judy is sharing one of her ideas and she records stories and then plays them in the car for perfect idea absolutely such a great idea and it's a solid idea too to have kids record stories that are written down or that they've heard on family search using the memories app and the feature of recording audio recording and this is so easy any time i love it thank you family search yeah you've simplified my life so much i think i i will thank them for you and also this section has a kid's corner we love it because it's kids talking to kids about family history it's not talking to adults how to involve kids actually little kids and some of these videos are an absolute riot especially the outtakes if you're going to watch this video watch the outtakes at the end yeah because these little kids were old libraries and filming like this but children talking to children about how what they do and how they get involved activities they're involved in anyway very very fun section i love it um so there's over 200 activities they're broken down into individuals families young kids youth and i have to ask you um and i know you're going to show some youth activities um how how like you how do you test these out with like your grandkids and how do you decide what activities are worthwhile like posting you sound like mike and merrill most guests you're wrong with last week we got to be on a little group with them and talking about these activities and they would always say how do you get this out to make sure it's really yes we test a lot of them out that's for sure and a lot of them are see we're a hub so what family history does is lead people to family search find a lot of the activities that are on family search so they can find them and know how to use them and and have specific ideas about how to expand their use and so it's really a companion in fact it's an approved training tool for family search by family search itself so it really is an opportunity and you vet so many of your activities that we know they work really well and we love them all we use them all the time we also use byu family history tech lab ones that are just a hoot i mean they're all out there i think we do have a plethora we have a myriad of um opportunities to find family history activities i think like you were saying earlier is how do you put him in and how do you think family history you know when you're just going about your daily duties and your your your flow of life pink family history and you will get inspired i promise when you get into this and become a family history enthusiastical the ideas will come and you will know where to find them and i mean 200 activities to choose from but all the many activities on family search they're just all out there and and kids once they get the the spirit of connection feel when they are talking about and learning about their ancestors then they jump on the boat at least some of them do you go to work on it with some but they do and and i was talking to my granddaughter today i said well what what is one of your favorite things she goes i just love to do family history with my friends we we have had a lot of her friends over of course and we know them all and we give them ideas and they do they do family history together okay i have to ask a family history question okay how did you two meet how did we do the long version of this short version we're gonna get the activities but i just i would love to know how you guys met short version is i was getting ready to go away to college and this most beautiful stunning woman walked into my ward one day luckily i had befriended her brother at our congregation and had a chance to talk to him ahead of time so when they walked in i said do you remember how friendly i was and what a good friend it was to you so come introduce me to your family and that's how it got started and then it's a long story from there because three years later luckily i talked her into marrying me wow and how long have you been married 49 years in three weeks oh happy anniversary oh my god you guys are adorable i love that um you like to do this together and i just think it's interesting you know to think about you know your family history and how your family has evolved to you know seven kids and 34 grandkids and it all started when you know 49 years ago when or 51 however many years ago when you guys included it right and how are you telling your story and then we'll get into the youth activities how are you recording your stories so fun lots of different ways and luckily we have family search because we found the pictures that you put on the memories and how you can put an audio file hooked up isn't that amazing and be able to click on that and have it in your own voice sharing a story and then and now you can tag topics yes them all together that is so great we found that our kids love their stories about about us about living people you know sometimes we think about family history it's like it's got to be an ancestor a long time ago what they really love to hear stories about living people in fact the only creativity that you have on family search we have found this to be one of the funnest things because we'll sit with grandma for example and sit with an eight-year-old child and say would you like to know what it was like when grandma was eight yes i love this idea yeah they relate to understanding yeah and they can find common things to talk about so how does that start telling you know when you say okay you know what was the gas price in that then she'll tell a story about how long it took to get from penguin to salt lake because her mom would never go past 8 miles an hour or something 10 miles an hour because she was so scared to drive and so it would take him so long and you know anyway they start telling stories when you get on this and i love all of that neon family searches just okay and we will put a link to that in that in that as well because i think that's fun so what you're saying is that activity and with a grandparent and an eight-year-old maybe you know they can ask each other questions and say you know what what was your life like when you were my age i think that makes it relatable right that's something that kids we talked about that last week with mike and marilyn because they want to know about experiences that relate to them where they're at like school or you know what was it like when we survived our first pandemic nope this is my first exactly that's funny because her mother started to talk about the pandemic when she was younger and the quarantine signs and i should go around and what it was like and the kids were fascinated by the fact that they had quarantined for smallpox and they had quarantined for polio and they had quarantined and all those things were things that she knew very well and as she talked about it they were really interested in and now look at us we're live streaming with people all over the world because we are in pandemic and family search has wanted to take this opportunity to connect with um enthusiasticals like the andersons and everyone who's watching so i'd say let's go back to the family history guide and talk about some of these youth activities that you guys have talked about and um i'm excited to see what you're going to show us because i think this is an age that people are really interested in they're understanding their identity and i think this can be something that would be very helpful yeah i think using social media for family history um that draws in the youth like if they can talk about their families on instagram to their friends and and do the relatable stories and that kind of thing you know it it's a great avenue i think so one of the things we found with youth is that they have a great desire to participate in something that's meaningful something that's worthwhile let's share one example with you okay we have our youth together and we happen to have in our little city a whole group of elderly people i mean like us you're not elderly our neighbor is 105. yeah wow and our other neighbor is a world war ii veteran right and he still has absolute clear memories of everything happened world war ii so we had a dinner and invited all those over 65 and then all the youth and after they got done with a nice dinner and interacting with each other we went into a room and all the elderly folks sat on one side of the room and all the youth sat next right across from them when i worked with young adults a lot they had a game they called speed dating we called this fast friendship because it seemed more appropriate and it's just that they had a whole series of questions and they would look and look at one of those elderly sweet people and ask him a question talk to him for two or three minutes then move and they did it for an hour hour and a half by the time they got done sharing some of our neighbors came up and said with tears in their eyes this is the most meaningful experience i have had in years those youth were really interested in us they really wanted to listen to what we had to say and it was such a great bonding experience for our community because all of a sudden our youth were starting to relate to the elderly and they were going over doing service projects and that kind of opened the door being friends and captured yet those stories so we had breakfast and they all got together again and this they took them in a room and recorded their stories on their memories app from family search and put their stories onto family search so that these wonderful stories they had heard while they were doing the activity were now recorded for their family to be able to hear um that we will not forget those kind of activities we've had with them they have been absolutely priceless wow well funded the youth said have you ever heard an escape room and we thought oh yeah we've heard about that so they said we got an idea let's plan three escape rooms and get a bunch of youth together and we'll have these escape rooms and have one of those rooms be about each one of these elderly people and something amazing that they did so they packed the room with memorabilia they decorated it all and then they had clues hidden all over the room that they had to find and put them all together and solve the puzzle and once they did the puzzle was the person who was about to walk in the room and then after all they'd studied that person to walk in the room and stand in front of them and tell them stories about world war ii or tell them stories about when this man was you can think if he was 105 years old he remembers and how life was so different for me back then it's just been a delightful connection to have youth get involved in meaningful ways doing service for elderly people who find right have a hard time getting on the computer i've already been doing social media stuff ever figuring out which button to push to record things sometimes but the youth are perfect at it they are so good and they've lived these amazing lives that um can sort of lift and edify us so did you call that one fast friendship yes fast friendships sometimes we've had dances where you know in karaoke where you can do like music from the 50s my mom loves that she's singing put another nickel in you know in the nickelodeon and she just loves to dance with all her grandkids and you know just you're thinking what can we do to draw the youth in and help them relate to like you know food but also music music is something like angel was saying that when they hear songs from the 30s and the 40s and then the stories start to come because music prompts memories and outcome all these crazy stories in fact grandma was telling us one the other day about the skinny dipping story maybe angel can tell you about that one oh that would make everyone's ears perk up yeah so in their little town of penguich the boys always went down to the canal or the river or whatever and and skinny dipped and so her little brother and this was during the depression of course um he was doing that with his friends and he was holding his his clothes up over his head and he dropped his shoes and um he came home and had to tell his mom because of course things were wrapped i didn't just drop his shoes he came home in his friend's clothes to some degree not wearing much because he couldn't find anything to wear oh my goodness but the end of the story is that they didn't have any more rations or shoes and so i got one certificate per year for a pair of shoes and that's that's it and and so he had to tell his mom my grandma and she said it's okay and what she did is she gave him her ration he got shoes to her to school and she spent the rest of the year teaching she was a schoolteacher these high heels and she never wore high heels that someone had given her and that's all she had to do really so all winter in penguin she was walking down the street in these high heels in the midst of the snow anyways a precious story and and that actually i put on one of my facebook pages because i wanted my kids to hear my mom telling that story in her own words yeah i love that i love that and you know what's interesting is what we have found is a lot of times people connect through sort of the hard stories you know so it's like include the fun stories right but also i think it's appropriate to share some of the harder things because that's where you feel less alone um so show the youth activities and maybe one of your favorites that you would recommend um that people do okay so as we're looking um just through this youth activities when we need to realize and remember that the family history guide's whole mission is to greatly increase the number of people actively involved in family history worldwide and everyone's family history journey easier more efficient and more enjoyable wow i love that part is where they go right they want to have fun you um they want to do things that like we said relate and bring them the spirit of connection right so you can see here on the family history guide this first video we have is just doing crazy fun family history games with an extended family and and they they are love interactive active and so if they're interacting with each other and doing something active and this one's all about that it's specific really fun kind of physical activities they can do that have a message for example one of these activities is called the human knock you might have heard about the human knock but all the kids stand in a circle they'll put their hands in and grab two hands and while they're unraveling and get all that done they sit down for a minute say how is this like family history what's it like to unravel your family history what's it like to hold on no matter how hard it gets and to try to work things out and to have them have that discussion about what they go through and how do they have any stories from their own families that had experiences like that where they could share we just kept hanging on and went through this difficult thing together so we've done a lot of those kinds of things with our grandkids in fact we just had like i said a family reunion and all of our family reunions of course are family history family reunion and so we just come up with tons of ways to get them involved um one of our favorite is to have a chart with however many um squares or circles to check off and during the course of the reunion they do family history activities and we have ideas written down pretty soon they're already in their own ideas and they can get more points if they do like a 50s dance as a group or whatever and you know because that takes the thinking away it's already there it's written down they can check it off and at the end when it's all filled out they get a special surprise anyway that's one thing that we've done with when our families together um the last reunion we had over 700 little dots they had to fill in with those couple years ago wow done in two days yeah fun things like go go ask aunt somebody so about this story or go ask and there are people right there and they can go interview them and ask them and interact and and that kind of thing creates this broader connectedness that we really want to have you know i didn't grow up with that i had three cousins in the whole world and i never saw them i never had a chance to have cousins that we could really interact with and all of a sudden now we've got these wonderful kids that have cousins and they love each other together really connect and feel that connectedness and we've extended family beyond our natural borders right a lot of other people too that's just so much fun absolutely everyone's welcome right i i love this i wonder um what are some things that you love to do in your family um tradition wise like do you have reoccurring traditions that are sort of unusual or memorable um that maybe we would never guess okay here's the crazy part of that that's the funniest thing to ask us because we keep a car one day and went on a long drive and we said what kind of things could we do that would make our family just our family right okay that's a great question say that again yes what kind of things we like to do that would make our family just our family okay this is great for anyone who wants to so then we kind of started with january 1 and we went through every holiday and every kind of activity and every kind of thing we did for the whole year 12 hours we were in the car by the time we got done we come up with all kinds of things that were just unique crazy things that our family would do and they had to have some kind of a purpose we wanted to do things that would help people feel better about themselves i mean we came up with a called applause we just put a person in the middle we all stand around have a pep rally we're all hearing as soon as anybody raises their hands we're quiet and they say something wonderful about that person then we all cheer until somebody else writes you know just and two minutes in the middle of the circle you just feel like you're the top of the world right awesome i love the idea and we started to come up with more and more of these we had an honors banquet that was on new year's eve that we found out that people got trophies and awards and all that for lots of things that would not matter longer than the next few weeks we've picked something that they had really exemplified that year a characteristic or character trait he gave a special award for something they had developed during the year and had a huge awards banquet i mean we dressed up they dressed up we had really nice food in fact we had catered sometimes that we would sit there around the table and have this big honors bank with honoring the kids and then the next morning we would talk about because then new year's day we talked about a theme for the next year what kind of goals we'd like to set things we would like to do and did this work perfectly no no never never that's fair never consistent about it but the funniest thing was i mean this could go on and on all the easy things that we started to do and so years later our crazy kids gathered around us and said we have a treat for you they had put together 187 family traditions that are anderson only right and they gave us yes yes let's see that each one of the kids had written oh my gosh memory about that activity on a sheet so it has the activity and we have some of our family members that are very articulate and love to write a lot and share their feelings a lot we have others very briefly would say i like this one but they're just the whole book's filled with things they consider to be andersonianism right yeah and it's always been it's just been so fun to look back yeah i love that you guys i think that that is so fun that the family culture that you created and you're continuing to create and dad's accordion plane okay back in the older days before digital cameras one of our traditions in here is taking the last three pictures on the roll of film in front of costco so we can turn it in all the kids standing in front of costco getting their pictures taken so we could turn into roll of film and get it developed that's awesome i love that um okay okay i love this and i like how you talked about like like you tried a lot of things it's not like everything was ideal or perfect and it wasn't ideal it's all about the trying and the memories and we remember the sometimes we remember the good and the bad can be like really entertaining and um never give up it sounds like and so i think that's helpful i would love to kind of know you something you talked about at the beginning and specifically with like family history guide's mission is to help people you know who aren't engaged in family history become interested and what would you recommend people who are helping people or want to invite someone into the family history space what sort of tips and recommendations do you have for that we'll share this screen one more time okay i so appreciate it this is you guys are this is really helpful and we appreciate um everyone who's watching as we're talking with the andersons about how to use family history guide to get people excited yeah don't you that um sometimes they just really want to get involved but they don't know where to start and they they just need a guide and i think that's what's so marvelous and incredible about the family history guide is that's what it is like it like takes you by the hand and says hey come on you can do this and here's how you know and so when you go to the get started and here's a bunch of ideas like we looked at before and then you can just decide what you want to do do you want to do research do you want to just start with some activities to get your family involved do you want to uh do you want to look at family search and see how to set up an account and there's step by step goals and um choices and goals and and and just makes it easy and so you can pretty much handle anything on here and if it's not on there let us know and bob bob we'll put it on there is your um tell us a little bit more about the website is it in english is it uh english only is there other languages um that's a good question yeah actually it's google translate but it translates into all those languages oh fantastic okay so that's kind of fun if you've ever read zulu or not wendy but you could try that i mean this is really helpful to show how you just did that um and then this is a great resource for people who wanted to get started do you have like as as family history enthusiast what did you say enthusiastically yes is there a commonly is there a common question that people wanting to get started um ask or an activity that's helpful to kind of help them along the way that you would recommend i think for many people and you tell me if this is true with you andy the idea of doing research the idea of starting there is a little daunting i love what's happened recently with family search and the discovery ideas because suddenly this is a way of life this is something they can do consistently and and it is true that so many people say i just don't know where to begin but if they can begin with something they're kind of familiar with like their own life if they go on to family search and find the 52 stories list every week we can answer a question from 52 stories and we could chat about it somehow or share it somehow or simple things that would kind of get them started with just the enthusiastical idea about finding meaning in the everyday how important those things are to others and will be to others now something else and maybe this would tie in a little that has really been amazing to us and we want to say thank you thank you thank you to family search because it was so meaningful to our family we found out a lot of times that people know a story about someone if they get to know an ancestor they might know a story about them but we realized that so many wonderful things have been put into family search and rather than using them in an isolated way a little here and a little there and looking up one aspect of somebody's life we wanted to kind of combine all those wonderful activities into a singular activity so we're helping our extended family kind of get involved we had an evening called discovery detective right oh yes talk about discovery details detective was so much fun because so many different aspects of what you do the timeline for example timeline had been a huge blessing to us but it's just you touch on it and there you have this whole list of breakdown of their family of a person's life and what happened to them and so many wonderful things on the memories app and so many even even the fan chart now you go on there's so many different clicks and you can see what nationality you can see what sources and stories are connected and so many things and the activity where am i from oh we love that one look that up every viewer you will love this it just really deep into [Music] and as all those right on that site check it out so come out we wanted to do all of that and there is a video we made because we were so excited about doing this we'll put the link in there and the link shows you the discovery detected night it was actually live filming of us actually doing it and it was kind of crazy with our grandkids we just got them together and everyone got an envelope and the envelope invited them to take some new part of family search and go look up a person same person they were all going to study the same person on the same night unique thing about this particular night was my beautiful wife the brilliant woman she is she had said three days before that we were going to do her grandfather and then she said they don't really know grandpa they never really met him let's do my dad their grandpa and grandma and they were very well acquainted with them and they knew them very well they thought this would be really fun for them to expand the details of their life so we gave out all these clues and the kids got busy and it included food they had eaten during the depression and all the kids sat down around the table and ate bread and milk we called them bowls my dad he called him a bowl and it was just bread milk orange peanut butter and ice cream break it up in the bowl eat it with a spoon we've grown up without all the kids but some of the grandkids haven't really tried it yet so i tried it tied right into the story so the whole night was like that they were looking up some wonderful things so many to do with the aspects and some of the campaigns they used some of the campaigns on family search and found letters that were from the past or details or they recorded a story or they interviewed grandma about some question in the midst of all that stuff happening right so about two-thirds of the way through this while we were filming it and we had the kids in trench coats like they were detected with their magnifying we got a call that said come quick and even though my father-in-law this wonderful man we were studying the day before had been to costco he was fairly healthy eating treats and enjoying life right he had been rushed into the hospital and we got to the hospital and then my wife came up and within the next 45 minutes he passed away oh my gosh while the kids were doing the activity hmm called home and said grab a roll just passed through the hospital right now i've been studying his life for the last hour and a half wow one of the sweetest memories in our family they gather around the table the timeline they had made they were writing down all the things about his life and what they learned and then they started to talk about personal memories and what it meant because he taught them this and they learned this and they went on for quite a while and then uh derek our one of our grandsons got up and quietly walked over the timeline and said grandpa rule passes away january 11th 2019. put it on the timeline and they sat down and just had some quiet time something about really bonding the memories now that that's a dramatic example and why that worked out like that we'll never know except for my wife smart inspiration that's it but but studying that but the idea that you can go way beyond just finding a story you can use a lot of tools one of the funnest things we've done and it's encouraged on family search is to use google maps yes and family together and one will say okay see my son was a professional entertainer in japan famous entertainer in japan and comedian and so he clicked on google earth and went to japan and all of a sudden was walking up and down the streets where he was and showing where he performed he was in korea for a while too i remember the bike seriously he went to his apartment in korea and because the film from google earth was old enough his bike was sitting in front of his apartment you can go to homeland you can go to ancestry your elementary school yeah all of that it's just yeah fun tool that you might not skip junior high but the elementary school um i just i just i could talk to you too forever and we it is time like i want to make sure that we have time to kind of as we're wrapping up i would love for you both to share just a couple of things where can we find you and continue learning alongside you and just kind of a message as our on those that are watching our family search global family that we we love so much you know a message of encouragement as as we wrap up so i would love to hear from you both about where can we stay in touch with you and what would you say to those people who are starting um or who are interested in evangelizing family history with people yeah i think one way yeah um we're on facebook um we have chef purple yeah i have a site called ideas for family history fun okay and i also have one called five minute family history ideas or fun five you know families and i've got a ton of those i think close to a hundred of just things you can do for five minutes only and i think that's a great way to get people involved but it's not too overwhelming right we are also broadcasting like you do every friday morning at 10 on something called high five live thanks live series called gathering which is all about families ideas and that's just a fun thing to connect in fact last week we had the greatest experience we interviewed our daughter-in-law her mother and her sister and our daughter oh three generations yeah three generations and they talked about storytelling and how we need storytellers now more than ever wendy is a pro on our show since we've been on hers yes i would love to let's do it i think that'd be so fun we'll make sure and yep we're posting links in the chat and um and then family history guide like what a great resource it's free there's lots of how to's as was demonstrated there's ideas for activities there's it's like i think scott you said it's meant to be a companion to kind of getting started or doing any research activity so consider family history guide as a tool in your back pocket and you can just remember that you are a lot better at this than you know you have your own memories you have your own life yes you have to do some fancy thing it doesn't have to be all organized it's just starting to share somehow and it needs to help you too because they know how to do these things yeah they're so fantastic yeah and they love it so don't believe that you have to be really good at it or really gifted editor certified like she is i'm not certified i just love to do it because it's so much fun with the youth to teach them that they do have a connection to the past because those stories are part of them they can learn from them and be influenced by those who have gone on before i love that you said because those stories are part of them they can learn from them and be influenced by those who have gone before that's beautiful that's tweetable great so give us your like i mean i think you've been saying it all along but as what's the last message that you would like to give to people watching just do it do something try to do something every day that has to do with your past your story your um should we say your spiritual dna mm-hmm sure yeah the things that make you you and and pass that on you know do something with those you love not everybody has a nuclear family not everybody has relatives that live around them like we do right you like scott said do your own leave a legacy yes live and leave a legacy i love it thank you so much for for joining us and thank you to everyone who tuned in we are so happy that you're here we're here each wednesday and we will see you next wednesday and

Channel: FamilySearch

Views: 1,247

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: YUPeKPOmyaQ

Length: 53min 22sec (3202 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 12 2020