Helping People One on One (Nicole Dyer, Megan Hillyer, and Jana Greenlaugh Live)

okay this is what i'm really excited about um today because i get to learn alongside everyone else watching from the three of you who have multiple times probably unknowingly and maybe knowingly inspired me because you have really modeled um how to teach people to get interested in family history to start doing something in family history and and i think it's really inspiring to see individuals such as yourself so passionate about something that you're willing to jump on instagram like megan and show people how to do things and talk to people you have no idea who they are and janna to say like i love family history so much i'm gonna make a youtube channel for kids with my you know seven kids and nicole i love the things that you do in the the lens that you bring to families and activities and ways to be interactive so we are here to learn from you today and so i'd love for you guys to just quickly introduce yourself and then let's really talk today about teaching people how to kind of get excited about family history and teaching them in a way where they're going to be successful and that's what we're here to learn from you today so welcome everybody and these three and let's go with megan let's start with you doing an intro and maybe just give us a little info on what inspired you to start understanding and learning family history sure okay so i am megan uh married i have seven kids we live in canada i know i'm in the janna club i want to be in the jana club i like them it's a little crazy um but i i don't know i've always been interested in family history i grew up seeing my dad work on it all the time and about four years ago i started doing pathway and then took the family history research degree from byu idaho and then as soon as i started learning i just wanted to share it with other people i was like everyone should know how to do this everyone should know how to how to find their ancestors and connect with them and so that's really what started me um to start an instagram page and i never thought i would do that now i have a podcast and i just really want to help people get started okay okay so we're gonna for sure talk a little bit more about what you do on instagram but like i said i think it's very inspiring and i love that you have gone to school for this so people that don't know pathways is an online education sort of it's a college program and so you can take and get certified and get degrees in lots of different ways and there's a really funny connection here that we'll talk about later but janet tell us who you are and a little bit about you and what you need to get started yeah you know i got started in family history uh as a teenager really i was always interested in it but i had a mentor who i love and he is my grandfather he's gone to the other side now but he did something really cool when i was 16 he called me up because he knew i had a new car and he said janna i am in a wheelchair why don't you come pick me up and take me to the family history library i need a ride which was interesting because he could have called anybody he's got neighbors but he called me it was great i loved my grandma grandfather so i would go and pick him up occasionally and take him to the family history library i became his research slave he would give me projects stick my head in a microfilm reader say look for this and that and i learned to love records and family history so it was my grandpa that got me started but i ended up degreeing in genealogy research from byu and getting an accreditation and england is my favorite thing england research is my uh specialty fantastic fantastic thank you and for those of you who are interested in learning more about helping people get started in family history you know feel free to pop some questions in the chat and we will you know we have a couple of things that you want to talk about but then we will take questions all right nicole up to you oh great so when i was 16 my mom introduced me to family history by inviting me up into her office to work on some research that she was doing she had just received all of my grandfather's family history papers and he didn't know much about his ancestors and so he had written letters to courthouses in the south which is where he's from and so we were just kind of starting from scratch building his tree and it was exciting to make new discoveries every day and we had just moved to a new area so i didn't have a lot of friends so i was just kind of sucked into this family history research and really got in really into it and then i started studying history in college and i got a degree in history teaching and i just continued researching family history and i became a consultant for my local area at the family history um center and stuff and then i my mom got accredited and she's a professional researcher and then she trained me and now i'm a professional researcher as well so we work together it's so fun and we have a website where we write blog posts and it's just the best to work on a family history business with my mom i love it that is the best story and didn't you publish a book yeah we have a book research like a pro and it's all the steps that she kind of learned when she was going through accreditation to solve cases research like pro we didn't need to you guys i mean you can get the book um so so you've all been interested in family history through different methods and um why why is it important for you to teach because this is something you're all passionate about like why you know what motivates you to do that we'll go to jana first sure you know i am i love it and that's why i want to teach it don't you find that when you find something amazing you just want to stand up on something tall and scream it to the world that's family history for me and and i think everybody is like that you don't have to be a professional or an expert to feel that way if you discover something in your own family history that makes you excited then naturally you want to share it and you want to help other people to feel excited too so i've um i've made my life a teach family history project and so i've got the seven kids i love to teach them however i can and then of course i've taught at conferences and online and to various groups and for byu idaho for a while this is just something i love to do so i do it okay i love that you guys let me tell you the kind of things i share with my friends it's like um you know nothing quite as significant as family history it's like a new song or you know something like that but yeah when you find something meaningful right you want to um share and i was talking about an experience i had a couple months ago at the local cemetery i think i was telling you guys um and there was a a car with some you know young men who were looking for you know this was right when pandemic happened and they were just kind of driving around and i was like they asked me a question and i we had a conversation and it turned into you know from a distance saying um download the family tree family search app let me show you my ancestors so we're in this like the driveway you know at the cemetery and they're just like oh my gosh this is so cool and then they found you know someone in their family who had passed a long time ago and um they went and found their grave so i i do think that there's this like how can we connect how can we inspire people and megan i think it's interesting because you have a connection to jana that i think you should tell people watching about yes yeah so when i started out my degree at byu idaho jana was one of my teachers in one of my first classes yay she did a great job so cool and so and now you're here and now you're teaching people and so janet like this is a great way to see it's so rewarding isn't it it really is rewarding to share with people nicole what about you like why and you learned from your mom you and your mom do this well we were both teachers in school so i taught middle school first and i even gave my students a family history project where they had to work on their pedigree and then i just started off teaching like that's what you do when you're a consultant you just help people all the time and i love doing it and i feel like anyone can learn to do it and most people want to know about their past and their family's history so it's just something that's like pretty easy for people to be interested in so anyways i just like sharing it because i think people want to know yes and i like teaching okay so let's talk about teaching someone what are some of the basics when you are starting because i know i know a lot of people get extremely overwhelmed because there's so like if you think of family search as a website it's massive so when you are teaching um and we'll go with megan first like talk to us just about some of the basics that you do give us the secrets so we all know what to do well i think you always have to start small um i know that when i first started getting interested in family history like 10 or so years ago i wanted to find my end of the line ancestors those were the people you know you want to find their parents and make your tree go further and further back and i just got frustrated it did not work out very well so i think that people need to um accept that they're probably not going to break down those brick walls that have been there for forever you need to start closer okay start learning about your parents your grandparents their siblings even okay there's there's always someone that you can learn more about in your family tree and um i i love that um and we've got just you know mentioning our viewers who are love to pop in and tell us where they are joining us from and eleanor from dark damp london i can tell you it's kind of dreary outside here and um we've got snow i'm downtown salt lake so welcome to everybody here and sarah yes i agree it is so cool that you guys get to do uh what you love okay so start small megan i think that's great advice because it feels so big um jana what would you say to people as they're starting to teach someone yeah i think one of the most important things that we have to remember as teachers is that you need to rather than present what you know and spit out everything that you know you need to be very careful to listen to your student whoever that may be whether it's a group of people or just your neighbor or your friend or your kid or whoever it is that you're teaching you have to listen and try to perceive what it is that they are interested in or their ability level right you've got to try and gauge where they're at so that you don't blow their mind or just tell them what you want to tell them instead of what they really need to hear you know so there's this um skill it's a skill for teachers not just in family history but anything we try to teach we really need to listen to who we're talking with and try and understand them better and then they'll be taught better does that make sense oh absolutely yes and it seems that we all need that reminder because i think sometimes with the enthusiasm and the excitement and the energy that you kind of talked about you want to impart all this information but i like and i think that's why this information so helpful because who would have thought of that unless you'd have all this experience um teaching so that's fantastic nicole what would you recommend you know from your background as we're teaching people for the first time a lot of times people want to start doing something but they don't know where to start and so they'll say can you just tell me what to do first and sure i have a lot of ideas for things they could do first and like i know how i would do it but sometimes the best thing to do is exactly what jana said is well is there somebody in your family tree that you have a question about or is there a certain ancestor that you're drawn to that you've always wanted to learn about and usually those questions are more helpful than just giving them like a methodology to start with because then you're focusing on a question that they have or something that they're already wanting to discover so they're a little more motivated to uncover more details that is awesome they're motivated to look for more details and we've got linda who is talking about um she begins in one place and finds herself hours later um not even in her immediate family tree but attaching sources and adding details from the sources so which i think is super awesome um and we have we're getting lots of questions so but um what you also teach kids you also um talk about ways to engage with kids so is there different advice for teaching kids family history when i say kids like i mean we can stay up until like age 18. so you can jump whatever with with whatever audience you want but let's say not adults who who wants to answer that one first i'll let you guys a big question wendy yes okay question we have like websites for you you know we will be posting your websites also um because they're really rich and full of resources but we just want to we just want the shortcuts we need to see well i think your question is about kids of different ages is that right right how do you help a different demographic and i've got right now my house seven like megan are you still at home megan mine are all at home right now they are yeah it's a busy life so i've got an 18 year old um but my baby is a toddler she's two and so we have the range of ages and yes it is different for different ages there's things you can do to teach your family as a whole mostly like activities and discovery experiences like movement if you really want to teach uh your kid you might want to spend some one-on-one time with them at their level meet them where they are so with my baby we sing songs or listen to music from our homelands or make recipes that are from grandma you know or look at pictures with my 18 year old we can get down into the records or do some major indexing so it is very different and there are a million ideas okay and you're the genealogy kids is your website right that's right that's right and we we do have um mostly instagram account is where we're active right now we're on facebook or youtube um but we do have a website too the genealogy kids dot com is kind of our library of ideas okay so um okay nicole talk to us and tell us your website also and give something so mine is familylocket.com and it's about keeping ancestors close to the heart so we talk a lot about research and finding your ancestors but when we first started i used to blog all the time about activities to do with kids you have a ton and some of the things that we have done like with my little kids because they are right now they're all under 10 and when i started doing family history with them they were all under six so we would do just little craft projects and i would tell them a story and we'd make a craft and on like memorial day and veterans day my son was always interested to learn about his great grandfathers all of whom were veterans of world war ii which is fun today it's veterans day and i asked them yesterday hey kids can you think of anyone in our family tree who's a veteran and they could all remember at least one name is somebody named hancock and was it charles williams something so they could remember a little bit you know they remember the stories and they remember what we've done in the past and so they just like making things we're just a craft family so we do little projects i'll print out little things and then we like we made a memorial wreath for memorial day that had a headstone on it of one of our ancestors who died in service and we went to the cemetery the next day and learned about the service members headstones and just we do a lot of hands-on things but mostly what i try to do is tailor my child's interest to the activity so like i said my son is really interested in in the military and he's also interested in cowboys and stories about his grandpa bob who was a cowboy so we made a little storybook like with illustrations and put it all together in a book and he was so proud of having his own little book that he wanted to make another book later about a different ancestor so figuring out that my son likes to make books now i know exactly what to do with them anytime we want to do family history together i love that you guys such great ideas and we've got um a lot and a lot of comments in here from people and kathy's talking about how stories um that you know they would connect people and i think they're engaging at all age and i love your idea of you know something physical with movement you know getting outside you know crafts um and then meeting them where where they're at which i feel like janna that's a key message that you'll probably see multiple times so everyone remember that megan what would you like to add to teaching um kids about family history i feel like i have not done a very good job of teaching my own children how to do it but i am as far as for teenagers i guess i have done a little bit i've made a few little youtube videos i think the family tree app is um is great for teens i mean even for adults but um for teens it's just something for them to do on their phone that is not social media or whatever that maybe aren't as uh fulfilling i don't know oh family family history can't be addicted um but just the family tree app there's so much you can do on there i was helping a group of girls in my community and none of them knew how to log in to family search and it just broke my heart and like just if you can get an account on there and get that app on your phone it can it can really bless your life okay i love love love this you guys um okay so we've got um first of all robert richmond is saying this is so heartwarming thank you ladies and i will second what robert is saying thank you thank you for sharing um okay so is there like a task that you do i know i know you talked about you know not overwhelming people but and meeting them where they're at but um janna you had talked about kind of a home base that you'd like to yeah talk a little bit more about that i have just learned over years of trying to teach people how to get started but also even teaching people that are already in this and you really have to have a place where you always land if you get lost on the internet or you don't know what you're doing or you're not sure what to do next because the internet is big and it's full of genealogy and there are so many resources and we go down these rabbit holes when we're researching people so it's very easy to get lost so i always teach people the first thing i teach them is that family search is their home base and i should say that you did not pay me to say that no i didn't my opinion and i'm even saying that as a professional genealogist we need a place where we can always kind of come back to if we're not sure what to do next and family search is that because first of all they have the open collaborative tree the one tree that we're all working on together and trying to connect together and that's a big deal um they have a huge help section uh including you know access to an army of people behind the scenes at family search that can help us when we get stuck and videos and articles and they have very importantly the research wiki which to me is kind of like a how-to manual and even though it's a wiki and it's changing and some places are better than others if i know okay today i want to learn about researching my helping my friend with their mexico research and i don't happen to know anything about that we jump onto the wiki we read the first page we learned how to get started so to me family search is the home base it's the most important resource out there i think that's a great information and i want to mention and we've talked about this many times on the live streams that currently the family history library you know it is closed to the public but there is um you can you can schedule online consultations with with experts and so one of our moderators if you'll brought that in a link to that but you can set up time and i listened to one of the specialists i think her name was corey and she talked about the wonderful experiences they've had and all the people who have signed up so take advantage we've got a couple of people saying do you help us with brick walls what's your suggestions so i think that would be my suggestion is just sign up for one of those consultations yeah they're free they're so all of our experts in the library are so happy to help and they feel like you know they guess that the patron is the most important so take advantage of that um okay nicole talk to us a little bit more about maybe something you would teach someone who's a little more intermediate if you will yeah that's a great idea i do try to gauge a person's experience level or the level that they might be comfortable working at you know with their technology is more advanced but they don't know anything about genealogical records you know trying to figure out where where they're at so sometimes i'll be helping somebody who's a beginner but they they're catching on really quickly and they seem to want to go find you know more records than what have already been found so i really like to show them the family search catalog where they can go in by locality and look and see what records from the microfilms have been digitized and browse through films that maybe haven't been indexed and find a lot more resources that are not available as hints and they can dive deeper into a little bit more research than what's available as as you know simple searches and that's always really exciting and fun because you can find new things that haven't been discovered yet yeah we had a couple of weeks ago ty davies and ian james on talking about computer assisted indexing and so that's really fascinating because what what they're trying to do is create a much faster method for digitizing so many of those images that aren't yet indexed and so it's really exciting to see and i can't remember exactly what they said but it was something like the time it would take for us to index all of the under indexed records i mean i want to say 400 years guys but i could be a little off so let's just say it was for like a really long time so there's always records being added and there's always new ways to kind of go in and see so thank you for that nicole and and megan you mentioned the app but talk a little bit more about teaching someone with the app um for the first time and what what your sort of approach is yeah um i think one of the funnest maybe that's not a word one of the most fun things to do with the app is to see how you're related to other people oh yeah there's relatives around me that you can do there i taught one group of women and we all opened up the app and did that and it was just really cool to see those relationships people some people didn't even know that their cousin was in the room um so that's one of the fun things to do on the app um but really the app like there's you can research on the app you can attach record hints um i like showing people how to look at photos and stories of their ancestors on the app um you can record things on the app like there's just so many things that you can do on there i think just people getting started showing them their family tree on there just showing them you know you can switch to the fan chart you can see different birth countries in the fan chart um just lots of different things on there so i i love the app and i love showing people how to use that i i love how sort of accessible it is some people can get very overwhelmed myself included um with you know when you're looking at all the things i feel like the app does a good job of sort of breaking it down i think that is a um i think that is a a good recommendation yeah and i think even so like sometimes i find myself getting stuck on my phone looking at useless information and if i just open up my app you can just browse the stories the photos the connections in your family tree and just feels a lot better i like that i like that idea of um browsing um okay nelson is he's he's contributing what he's done what he does he says i've never talked the same way twice i've never had two friends that were looking for the same thing so that's exactly what you guys are all saying and make it about who you are who you are teaching and your audience i think that's really important um thanks nelson and we've got a link to the online consultations on here so we're really grateful to everybody at the library who's working on that and delilah is also talking about she is indexing slave registers of puerto rico and let's just say thanks to the indexers and so this is a great way to kind of get familiar with records right is to kind of give back and is this something that you guys have invited people to do i think jana you talked about that um indexing and so what what what is there any method for that that works better than another bribery yeah maybe i'll tell you a quick story about indexing and children usually we like to rather gather a group of children when we do this because one child it's just more of a party and also have pizza yes indexing is better with food but um about indexing last week we had a family indexing night this just happens sometimes at our house we don't even plan it it it doesn't have to be pre-thought we just we have to be watching a movie it was coco day uh day of the dead last week so we put coco on because our kids like that and we just gathered the laptops in the house and we sat around in the family room and anyone who was old enough to know how to index we sat down and we indexed and uh it's interesting because uh you know the movie makes it a little better but sometimes indexing is kind of boring for people it's not the thing that makes them really excited about family history and i had a 14 year old and it was like pulling teeth we were like come on everybody gets a batch do your batch do your batch and you know one image was all he could handle but i think it's important to say it's okay there are amazing indexers out there and if that's not your thing that's okay but if it is awesome because some of us use those databases that you're creating every week and we're grateful but finding the interests is what i'm getting to finding the thing that people really love to do is really important so introduce kids to it introduce adults do it do but don't necessarily imply that that's just family history there are other there are other ways to look at it yes i think that is a good caveat jana and um okay we can take um questions and really we want to take questions around um tips for teaching family history and you've said quite a few things that i think are really beneficial and a lot of our our viewers are also um saying that those are things they've learned or they they haven't learned but i would love for you as we're just seeing what questions we're gonna get to talk a little bit about maybe a success story that you have had um when you're teaching someone and you know we love to hear stories we are family search after all we're all about story so nicole will you kind of kick it off and share a little bit of a success story absolutely this is a fun topic i was pondering what to say and i thought of a friend that i helped like eight years ago and then i was reminded of my sister-in-law who has been asking me a lot for help so i'm gonna share the sister-in-law so camille has been wanting to work on family history because she sees how much fun i have doing it and my mom and we're always talking about it and so she wants to get in on it right and so she she and i talk to each other on marco polo on our phone so it's like video chatting you know little messages so she would send me a marco polo says okay i'm getting started with family history what should i do and this is a question people ask all the time they're like what do i start with and then like i said i asked her so what are you interested in doing like do you want to just start with your grandparents and go back in time and kind of confirm some of the sources that are already attached to get familiar with your family tree or do you want to work on like a research project where you choose a question and like look for resources that will answer your research question and she was like well i think i'll start with attaching records a couple weeks later she sends me a marco polo that was kind of boring i didn't really like that so i was like well let's try doing a research project maybe you'll be more interested in finding the answer to a question in your tree so she chose a question she started researching taking notes and then a couple weeks later she was like oh that was kind of hard i don't know if i was ready for that so then i suggested well maybe we should work on some dna analysis and ask your grandparents if they've tested and see what you can find out she just loved that she started like talking to all of her four grandparents they had all taken a dna test she got access to all of their results she started sorting them and looking at their trees and matching up common ancestors with the dna matches and she just shared her report that she's been writing with me about one of her grandparents great grandparents that she found dna matches that support the conclusion that was just based on clues that she hadn't found any real evidence for so she wrote a whole report about it and it was amazing and i was so excited that you know like asking her giving her some ideas and her coming back for more questions was able to find a path for her to to find something that worked for her that she was interested in so you just never gave up and you kept saying there's all these different um paths or uh approaches so i think that is a great a great tip um okay megan do you want to talk to us about a success story next sure a lot of the people that i teach i don't know like on instagram there's people that follow my little videos or whatever um or my online course but i'm gonna talk about my mom so she's always wanted to be interested in family history she my dad has done it a lot yeah but she's like i know it's something i should be doing but it i just she gets overwhelmed or whatever um so she took my online course and um just at the end of the course what we do is we write their life sketch and so all of the information that she found she was able to write this little story about one of her relatives and just i know that it was uh special for her to be able to do that and and i was grateful that i was able to help her with that um so i guess that's one of my success stories i love that i yeah i appreciate that and um we've got a couple of people talking about um that they started started indexing and not only are natalia i can't even know if i'm saying that right and bobby first time watching welcome um natalia natalie i don't know um she said she helped an old old friend find siblings that he never knew existed he was had been missing them for over 40 years i helped reunite them and got to be part of their first video chat it was an emotional blessing to help them oh i love that that is really um fantastic okay talk to us jana about um one of your favorite success stories and i would say let's just point out that megan is one of your success stories because people you're teaching i hope so yes i think so i think so and there's a cute little door knocking in the background i'll just i love it we are all so um here's a story the other day we had some friends over and the purpose was to show them some things about their family history they they really knew nothing and a lot of times when i do this i'll ask them to tell me a little bit first before i have them over so i do a little bit of prep work right like this is just crazy me but i i want them to have success when they arrive in that hour or two that we've scheduled right i don't want to be searching for two hours and have them realize this is hard this takes a long time their first experience needs to be good so i had done some prep work i i knew you know their basic tree and i was in there looking for some new and exciting things that i could show them and i found i found some they didn't know who their great grandparent was and i was able to show them how to figure that out and and that was cool but what was really funny uh was that when they were there and i was showing them this it was great and they were grateful but they really got excited when we logged them into relative finder which is a byu tool yes uh byu's created this and and it uses family search but anyway it shows you how you're related to celebrity so-and-so yes and uh it's funny you never know i get excited if i find someone's great grandmother i think that's really cool but they were so excited that they were related to some celebrity and uh you just never know when you're teaching someone what it is that's gonna spark their enthusiasm and for them that was it so think outside the box whatever you think it is that they need is is probably not always right so that's oh such good stuff and i think this is good for life right like when you're interacting with people regardless of what you're trying to teach or have have some sort of connection don't make it about yourself all the time right like that's awesome okay we have a couple questions not necessarily teaching related but someone is asking the call um how do you you talked about your cousin and what she did with the dna results um getting those and then um kind of uploading them or sorting them what what does that say more a little bit more about that that's probably like a whole we're gonna do some dna live streams but but how do you sort dna results is kathy's question that's a good question so we just start with figuring out who the common ancestor is with the closest matches so like let's say you see a first cousin match and you look at their tree and you see that they have the same you know grandparents as you so now you know that they're on your grandparent you know that certain grandparents side and then you see a second cousin and then you look at their tree and you see they have a common ancestor that's your first great grandparents on a certain side and so you kind of can see okay they're descended from that side of my family tree and this other cousin is from this side of the tree so now you have kind of two groups and you can just like put them in a spreadsheet or you can make little colored dots like on ancestrydna where you add colored dots that's my favorite system is the color dots on ancestry and then everybody in different ancestral groups with different common ancestors gets different colors so there's also the the leads method which is a fun way of sorting with excel you can look that up what was the method leeds method dana leeds website has a tutorial for it okay okay great um and now someone is asking and maybe janna will have you take this they're talking about sorting and organizing papers and files like what method would you suggest for that oh that's a big question too and it depends what it looks like really um if if these are things that aren't digitized and they're important family history things then your very first step is to take that box to wherever you're going to get it digitized and scanned obviously because you've got to preserve it but wow when it comes to sorting there are so many different methods and you already know i'm a family search fan but using the memories tool to to upload your documents and just have a safe place to keep them i mean there's a lot of things you could do in your own home and on your own computer filing system but to me it's important to know that anything i have digitized is uploaded and shared to a place where it is going to live on even if i get an erect tomorrow so there's a priority with documents to to preserve them that's the first step and then when it comes to actually organizing them it's going to be a factor what documents we're talking about what you know how many ancestors they relate to if you've got to sort them into branches of your tree and things like that so you could do a whole family search live about that wendy we could that would be really interesting and i think there's a lot of different you know i've seen um i yeah i even think people could even look on the wiki because i know i've seen some recommendations um on the wiki for organizing physical sort of research and there's different logs talk about what the research logs are and what purpose they serve especially is this something a beginner um should participate in yes yeah here's my thought on logs and logs are very important in research and none of us have a brain that's capable of keeping track of all the places we go where we find what details what page numbers helped us to get there and so it's important that we keep a log for for research to be organized but i have something else to say about that too and that is if you are teaching a brand new beginner about family history and you suggest that they keep a complicated research log then you've way overshot your purpose for the day so since we're talking about that today i just want to make that point research blog is not step one go to family search and explore that's step one research log is okay once you or the person you're teaching is ready to be a little bit more you know methodic about what you're doing yes keep a research vlog and i keep mine in either a table in a document or in a spreadsheet um which i create myself i don't have a particular you know form out there that i love i like to create my own because then i can i can add and manipulate them how i want to so i just keep my own but i always share them upload them to attach them on family search to whoever it applies to so that other people can see it okay i love that and i think i think it was diane who was asking about staying organized with sort of notes and and paperwork um and whatever method is going to you know work best and try a couple things out and and don't let it stop you from doing something right like for sure yeah and and um yeah post more questions guys as we are uh if there's topics that you'd be you'd be interested in uh megan i wanted to so i will um jump on instagram and i often see that you do different like you know helping people getting started and you tell us about some of your approaches to that because you make it seem so easy um what have you found is most successful when you're kind of trying to say let's get started on family search because you do things like five likes challenges or days and things like that right yeah i've done a couple different challenges on instagram um i have a little free five day challenge um but i think i used to post a challenge every saturday um something for people just to try uh on their family tree um i haven't done it for a while so i'll need to get back into that but there have been people that are like oh you didn't post a challenge this week and sometimes on instagram you feel like you don't know if people are receiving it or not you know some people just don't respond um but i think i always provide some motivation some sort of quote or something to get people thinking about it and then a lot of times i focus on record hints because i know that's a big hangout for people what kind of things to look for as they're looking at these record hints how to decide if they're right or not and different things like that but i really like instagram and so i love sharing on there and hearing from people who like what i've done has actually helped them get into it um i keep doing it because i i see it and i'm like you go megan you go like keep going okay there's one other thing i want to sort of ask you guys and in your years of your wise years of teaching people family history and in your own experiences what do you do and i haven't asked you guys this yet what do you do when you're with someone who has a difficult discovery and there's you know a lot of conversation about the stories that are inspiring and the adventure and the cowboy and these you know people who left their homes and you know came and came for a new life or you know we hear and we're often very proud of those stories but there's oftentimes that are stories that can be painful and what recommendations do you have for people who are experiencing that themselves and then people who are teaching someone who's having that experience um who wants to take that question first okay please thank you this happens a lot i think um some people might feel less than if they have stories like this in their history so i think it's important to you know empathize as much as we can and then try to share like you know i have some black sheep ancestors too and um you know sharing those stories and connecting over things that we might have experienced as well can be helpful and my mom recently found out that her great-grandfather took his own life and that was kind of a difficult discovery but it actually was also helpful in understanding some of the mental health issues that were going on in that family line and kind of helped us understand some things in the present as well so i think it's like a double-edged sword right it can be difficult to find them out but sometimes there is a positive side to it and hopefully the people that we're teaching we can connect with them by sharing our own stories because i think we all have something in our family history that maybe is hard and and for me i have found that you know learning about some of those what would be seen as hard and and would would indeed be hard are extremely that you we connect from our weaknesses sometimes right and it just makes you feel um i don't know like oh i'm not alone or i you know all these things that we say right i come from strength and resiliency and and i think it's part of sort of i think it's called the oscillating family narrative like there's some hardship and we overcome it and here we are today let's not pretend it didn't happen and we know too from research that not talking about traumatic things isn't any help isn't helpful and there's lots of ways you can do that you can journal you can talk you know um but pretending it didn't happen is probably not a good approach and i know for me that i appreciate when i can learn more about ancestors who had hard things and yeah so thank you nicole janna what do you want to add to that yeah i'm glad you brought up the um the term oscillating narrative i think we still that from uh you know several years back bruce feiler um in his article talked about how important this is for children to understand the oscillating narrative the ups and the downs of their own family history and that that is really important to remember because if we only tell the happy stories and we make heroes out of only the happy elements of our ancestors lives then we only have half the story because we're all human and understanding that and seeing it recognizing it it connects us to them better for example i had an ancestor that i had researched for many years and i had kind of built him up as a hero inside of my head you know he was one of my people i had i had learned to love him and his family even though i didn't know very much about them but when you work on someone that long you do and one day i discovered the court record and the newspaper article where he was described as the scoundrel in town and my first response was to be a little bit heartbroken but almost immediately i was like oh no he stole that piece of meat from that butcher because he had 10 kids to feed or maybe he was actually scoundrel but either way life was hard for him and i was able to look at his life a little differently than i had before having learned those negative facts about him so it this is important well and you know we're all built up of all these experiences and so i i appreciate how you know you you you talk about that and i think when you're saying if we're just telling the happy stories of the past and we're living these you know days that are like they're up and they're down it's like oh wait you know they did too that just really like let's tell those and it doesn't have to be broadcast right it can be done in a respectful way it could be you know but i don't think we need to be ashamed or or hide from them either um megan what what thoughts do you have around that yeah well i was just thinking i think it makes our ancestors seem more real when we realized that they had a life they had ups and downs they had problems just like we do and i think that just makes us feel more connected to them and more like they were actually people that lived and that had a life um and and and yeah they had a life and and there were things that were hard um and lisa is saying um that there's a difficult story she feels that she needs to tell and she has permission from the person to write it and she just doesn't know how to start it or how to write it do you have any suggestions for her because i sure do let's go with you guys who wants to take that one should i okay i i have um where is this book this is the gentleman who's did some of the first research around um it was holocaust survivors and they weren't telling their story because it was so painful many of them were young and so he did some academic research i think it was james penbaker and joshua smith and they did research around people narrating these experiences and what happened to their physical and mental health and they watched that and this really kicked off i think what he said has turned into thousands of studies and so lisa the the answer that i think i would recommend is whatever method makes sense to you so i when i when i journal myself i do a variety of methods sometimes i write often times i record myself with the voice memo because i'm verbal no surprise there so whatever lisa whatever is is the way that is gonna have the least obstacles that's what i would say to do and um oftentimes it's less about the outcome which is this recording or this written piece as it is about the experience when you're talking about kind of going through the the trauma and this is you know opening up by writing it down so it's there's a great some great research out there that can talk about that process but i would recommend do whatever is going to be the easiest for you um because you know it's like with cameras what's the best camera the one you have with you right um okay so we are getting to the end and i am looking oh wendy just said a lovely thing she said every soul is a testimony of god's love and fingerprint and sherry people are also replying to lisa sherry says start at the beginning sit on it for a while and rewrite if necessary and make sure you get both sides of the story so there's lots of resources out there and thank you for answering that question i think it's something that i would love to see talked about a little bit more um okay as we're wrapping up tell us like your very favorite um like family teaching family history experience tips anything you guys can just share one last thing and it can be whatever you want and make sure to tell us where to find you um where we can learn because i you know we can all benefit from learning alongside you does who wants to take it um who wants oh megan uh karen is saying she just looked at your youtube site and it looks awesome so so megan let's start with you tell us where to find you and then just whatever you want to say okay um i'm predominantly on instagram modern genealogy is my username there also on facebook i have a website moderngeneology.ca because i'm canadian um and i have an online course there um but i'd say my tip is i think a lot of us have a full tree i had a very full tree and it was really hard to find people to research so researching siblings of my ancestors that's where i have found the most success with finding new records and finding new information often they get forgotten we're just interested in our direct line but if we research those siblings and their children we can have a lot of success so that's one of my tips i love it and let's just say i loved what you said they get forgotten we and everyone who's watching this and everyone that you've you know you teach one of the reasons we do this is we do not want our people to be forgotten so that was beautiful um jana on to you all right well you can find me uh and my children uh at thegenealogykids.com um but like i said we're more more active on instagram so the genealogy kids is our account there and if you want the professional genealogist jana you can get my contact info through the icapgen website because i'm an accredited genealogist on their directory um but i guess for a final tip i have kids on my mind constantly so i'll share one more kid tip um i just wanted to share that as we are looking for ways to teach our families so whether that's your kids or your grandkids or your nieces nephews neighbors whoever the kids are in your life i think it's really important to remember it doesn't have to be complicated it can be very simple and you can build it into daily life you know like you can talk about the recipe you're making you can grab a photo grandma and tell a story it doesn't have to be elaborate it can be really simple and it should be because then it becomes part of our life and our our routine and we do it more so there's there's a final tip for you i love that i love how you said it becomes part of our routine and we do it more and you can just immerse yourself in kind of being reminded that family history happens all around us we live it right i love that um okay nicole okay you can find me at familylocke.com and we have a facebook page too and then my mom and i have a weekly podcast called research like a pro so we do that together it's really fun to talk to her every week about genealogy so my final tip is when you are feeling overwhelmed or if the person you're teaching is feeling overwhelmed one of my favorite things to do is just set a goal to spend like 30 minutes a day on something and sometimes i think we think we are expecting to be able to find these big chunks of time like where we're gonna have three hours to sit down and research and often we don't have that large of a chunk in our day but if we just do 30 minutes a day for a month we can make huge strides in writing that family story that we've been wanting to write or in learning how to attach hints and kind of becoming familiar with the website whatever the level is that you're at just committing a little time every day can take away some of the overwhelm oh i love that okay this was delightful um nicole and jana and megan and thank you for everyone who joined us and there's been some great conversations going on in the comments and as we wrap up i want to invite everyone that next week and you guys you've got to come and watch this next week we're doing our live stream on tuesday and i'm super excited because we will be talking with dave i say who is the founder of storycorps and so we are going to get all sorts of information about stories and um and sharing and he and his organization are kicking off the great thanksgiving listen in where they invite young people to interview seniors and to document stories so it's such an important part of connecting and so come join us but it will be tuesday so we would love to have you there and um for everyone else that you know just thank you from family search and we want to invite you to come and see what you can find out about your family give us comments sign up for consultations we love your feedback and we just appreciate the opportunity to engage with people like our guests and like our our viewers so thank you everybody have a wonderful day thank you

Channel: FamilySearch

Views: 2,215

Rating: 4.9024391 out of 5

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Id: 7N-IUiW2pIU

Length: 55min 40sec (3340 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 11 2020