This program utilizes many resources to teach and guide us through the steps to making our family tree, accurate, useful, and important to us and to our posterity. It fills an important role in insuring that our ancestors are known, loved and appreciated for their sacrifices of the past. We are their posterity and we reap the benefits of what they did to influence our lives and our futures.
More than anything, engaging in family history work assures they will be remembered. Without carefully compiled records and stories and memories being preserved, these precious people in our families will be forgotten very quickly. Often within a generation or two they fade away. How very sad that is when we consider that each life is important with lessons to teach those who follow after them. It is invaluable that we can now save these precious things online for all to find and see and enjoy for decades to come. We are the pioneers in bringing this to pass for our family legacy to endure.
I have worked on our family history for decades. I have taught many people how to begin doing their genealogy and family history. For all these years I had wished for something like The Family History Guide. The Family History Guide would have been such a help in my own learning in the early years and in my attempts at helping others back in the old days. Never had the need been so profound as in the first three years my husband, Jim, and I worked in the Oakland Family Search Library as volunteers and then as Service Missionaries these past four years. A bridge was needed to be built between two beautiful things genealogy and technology. In those days there wasn't anything. Technology was barely up and running for Family History. Family Search/Family Tree was the beginning of some very good things in the field of genealogy.
During that time I was blessed to meet a cousin of Jim's. He became and still is a very bright and willing mentor and friend to me and many other people. I was taught with great patience and by an expert. I wanted to pay it forward in the library. I needed The Family History Guide then to help patrons. They needed a take away exactly like the Family History Guide. Where we could get them oriented to a training program they could use independently.
Jim and I had countless conversations about the need for something like The Family History Guide in the early years. We were concerned about the feelings of frustration of so many when they looked at the ominous task of learning it.
Their questions often lead to more foundational information being needed. Often we didn't know ourselves. We were not practiced in giving just the right amount of information to keep them coming back to learn more. We did not want them to become discouraged. It is a fine balance!
They needed a step-by-step approach that wasn't available until 2015. No one can conquer the task of eating an elephant at one sitting in a library. Likewise family history has to be broken down into tiny bites, systematically organized, easy to follow and trackable as we go along in our process of learning exactly how to get it done.
We can learn all kinds of things bit by bit but it doesn't always create a firm foundation of knowledge. As the various online trees came onto the Internet, we'd learn a little here and a little there but without the basics, they were all pretty vague, disconnected and not that useful. It created what I call a Swiss Cheese Brain. You have some solid knowledge about some of the basics but you will be working along and come to a big hole in your understanding. Sequential learning can remedy that along with a few other things.
First, you have to have a real desire to learn, recognizing that it will not happen without your consistent sustained effort. It is like everything else in this life. What you put into something determines what you will get out of it.
Second, you have to put your hands on it. You must do it. It is great to sit next to someone and have them show you how, but you will not "own" that learning until you use it yourself. Have you heard of the Thorndike Principles of Learning? If not see this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Thorndike
Third, get help with the resources you have available to you. The various websites like Family Search, Ancestry, My Heritage and Find My Past and other sites have online help, contact help, classes online, etc.
To me the best resource we have now for these sites is The Family History Guide. Having all the big players under one roof is the best. The thing to remember is that this website is not static, but rather it is very dynamic. It is changing and growing all the time and keeping up with the changes in the big sites as well. I honestly do not know know how, Bob Taylor, does all that he does but somehow, miraculously it gets done. Bob Ives our COO, is amazing too. The staff is growing weekly in an attempt to stay on top of everything. Also the Chairman of the Board is, James Tanner, my favorite blogger for years now and surely one of the very best teachers around today. He has his finger on the pulse of family history and technology all the time.
Fourth, if you are blessed, as I am to have a mentor, follow their directions and do your part. When someone agrees to help you, help yourself and work hard. They usually have people waiting in line for help. If you do not do your part they will move on to someone who does. There is no price that can be put on the selfless mentoring from another. It is a gift of kindness and their valuable time. Express your gratitude, do your part in a timely manner, then pay it forward with someone who needs your help when the time comes.
Remember that you can learn a little each day and track your progress on the Family History Guide with the Online Tracker. This is better than going for the big thrust once a month into it and then putting it aside for 30 days or, in most cases a lot more.
I believe that you will acquire a passion for it when you see how it redefines family for you and you learn to love the people who were once only a name on a page. The Lord has asked us to do this work because he loves us. He knows how much all will gain as we engage in it. The family unit is ordained of God as the most important social entity in his creations. He wants us to know and love ours. As we do this we will prosper in ways one can only imagine until they have experienced it themselves.
As I said in the beginning I have been appointed to be the Family History Guide's Social Media Coordinator. I could not be more excited about this project. It is perfect for me with my love of genealogy and my insatiable need to write constantly.
It also came into my life at the perfect time, one day before my birthday...a big one...that had me feeling I was not only over the hill but sliding down the other side quite rapidly. This timely opportunity made me feel I still have something to contribute to the world after all! I am thankful to God and my husband, who gives me his full support as I challenge myself to learn and grow, even in the autumn of our lives. I am also very happy that the people at the Family History Guide have opened their arms and hearts to me as I have begun this journey with them. I am honored to be numbered among them.
The Family History Guide Association is a labor of love by all concerned and a non-profit organization. It has achieved Public Charity Status with the IRS as of October 2017. We survive on your Donations and now they are tax deductible.
I love being retired and being allowed to work hard at what I choose. It is a blessed time in life when we can be rewired to do exactly what we want to do. Being retired in the world's view of it, is a long way off for us! No thanks to rockers and lap blankets at this stage of the game! For this we are so very grateful.
I have been posting on Twitter: Search-The Family History Guide; two different Facebook pages: Search-The Family History Guide which is the Company Page. Also see The Trainers' and LDS Consultants page: (A closed group) Search-The Family History Guide-Trainers, Consultants and Directors page. If you are a trainer, consultant or director in a Family Search or Family History Library and would like to join this group, please do. All ward, stake and branch family history workers are encouraged and welcome to join in also.
In this blog I will post the Facebook entries and perhaps some of the daily tweets. I will be incorporating Instagram soon and I am already doing posts on Pinterest. The Family History Guide's Official Blog is now up and running. Using The Family History Guide that you are reading now, is my personal blog for people that do not use social media. This way I can share social media posts with you and tag them for quick retrieval. In this way I'll also keep a running list of what I have already covered in the social media daily postings.
One last thing is I will be adding various photos of beautiful trees. They will be symbolic of our families trees and at the same time save my sanity with all this white paper.
I adore gorgeous trees and I need color in my life. I hope you will enjoy them. Each will be wonderful and unique in the same way that our own family trees branches are. I'll post photos of trees in the current season of the year. Right now it is autumn, but winter is just round the corner! Some will be tiny and some will be huge, but hopefully they are all growing and thriving, as we work to nurture and care for them in a consistent way.
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