Family History in Every Season: Building Relationships Across Generations

I was asked to help the Temple and Family History committee in our ward give a fifth Sunday presentation about family history. If you’ve been given a similar assignment I hope that you might be able to use some of what I’ve done (or go ahead and use all of it, the work’s been done so it might as well get more mileage) to help you prepare a meaningful lesson for your ward as well. Or if you just want some inspiration and to learn a little bit more about how you can be more involved in Family History in some way, or why it might be important to you, this is your chance to pretend like you were at my presentation that day 🙂

Specifically the committee wanted me to talk about how people can upload memories to Family Search as a way to help with their family history work. I was given WAY more time than I needed for that particular part of the demonstration so I decided I would start with some of the “why” behind family history and then work my way up to showing the “how”. I figured the memories section would take me 5 minutes at most and I had the whole meeting, and I really wanted to recreate a role play that I’d seen done in a previous ward that had deeply impacted my view of family history.

Well…. of course sacrament meeting that day went over by a good bit and it took awhile to empty out the chapel after the combined missionary farewell & homecoming that day. So my time was cut short. In the end I never made it past the “why” to get to the “how” that I’d actually been asked to talk on – oops! The ward members still seemed to really appreciate what we did get to and I think it was still a successful and meaningful lesson. My husband afterwards rolled his eyes at me. It was so typical “Brittny” to find a way to do a completely different assignment than I was asked to do, and have people like it anyways. I really did have every intention of sharing what I was asked to do though!

I figured since I’d put this all together I would share it here too, and actually put in the part that I promised I would get to in my original presentation. If you jump to the end I have all of the files that you are welcome to use and modify if you like any part of it for your own ward. I’ll go through basically what I presented in the blog post too so that you understand the context, rather than just having slides that don’t mean anything to you.

I actually presented with my mom, which was fortunate that she happened to be in town for that 5th Sunday because she is the family genealogist and knows MUCH more about all of this than I do. I’ll include my slide deck and print outs at the bottom and if someone else wants to do something similar in their ward I hope that this gives you some good ideas to put together an easy and compelling lesson 🙂

So I’m going to admit up front that most of my graphics are AI generated.  I’m not artistic and I had specific ideas for how I wanted to portray some of the ideas so AI was my best bet… but if you look too closely there are definitely cursed faces and some real jankiness in some of the graphics…. So try not to look too closely.  When I was asked to teach a fifth Sunday temple and family history lesson I thought it was kind of funny because I don’t actually do genealogy.  I know how to open up Family Search and poke around a little bit, I know how to look people up in census records and I know I have the right skill sets to really be good at genealogy.  But I don’t do genealogy.  Why?

Because right now I feel like my part of doing genealogy work is in the branches rather than the roots.  Rather than feeling guilty that I’m not spending my time finding my ancestors I’ve embraced the fact that I’m devoting my time to their descendants – and that’s ok!  When I was growing up my grandma was the family genealogist and my mom didn’t have the time to order microfiches and fill out pedigree charts.  Today my mom has moved into her genealogy era and I’m the one running to soccer games.  But I know that one day I won’t have soccer games to run to and I’ll be the one ordering copies of death certificates to fill in the charts.  I know that sometimes we have family history lessons and if you’re not in your genealogy era you might be tempted to pull up candy crush and tune out – but I hope today that we can help you find ways that you feel you can be a part of family history in whatever era you’re in today.  I’m not going to tell you that you have to do all the research if research isn’t your thing, or attend the temple every single day.  But there is *something* each of us can contribute to this work and I hope to help you find something that you can do in your present era.

As we started to put this lesson together my mom told me about this video clip that she saw at Roots Tech a couple years ago.  The original presenter wasn’t able to make it to the convention so at the last minute they pulled in an engineer to give this breakout session.  Now, I’m a computer programmer and I know that the last thing you want at your big convention is to pull out the engineers and make them talk.  Engineers are rarely people people. They are happy to hide in a closet and build cool things but please don’t make them talk to someone about it.  But what this engineer had to say completely changed the way my mom looks at family.  The video was too long to watch in our lesson and there wasn’t just one little clip that showed the point, so I’ll summarize.

At the beginning of his presentation he told the audience that what they’re doing is all about building relationships and uniting families.  He went on to talk about all of their different updates and each time showed how each tool and feature was created with the object of building relationships.  If you’ve used the “find my relatives” feature before it might seem kind of silly – unless you understand that the idea isn’t necessarily to help fill out a chart but to connect you to other people. 

So that’s what I want to focus on – it’s all about relationships.  It’s not about charts, or records, or checking boxes at the temple – it’s about relationships.  If you take nothing else away from what I’m sharing THAT is what I want you to take away.  Temple & Family History work is about building relationships.  I told you that I don’t do genealogy, but one of the ways I contribute to our family history work is by trying to still build relationships on both sides of the veil.  Obviously the ones with my own living family feel the most important, but I try to treat my ancestors as real people because… they are.  I can’t be the one digging through records right now but I try to do my part to listen to my mom when she’s discovered a new line or wants to show off the pictures she got from her dad.  I may not be finding the people myself, but I try to always cherish the memories or tidbits of information that I can learn about those that have gone on before so that I can build a little bit of a relationship with them. 

I would like to hear from you in the comments about how we build those relationships with those who have come before us.  I thought I would start by telling you some of my own experiences. This picture shows some women who are an important part of my personal family legacy.  I am on the far left and my daughter is on the far right.  If you think my daughter looks like she might have just been crying that’s because we’d just done a gender reveal for our 5th baby and she’d just discovered that he was going to be a 4th brother… and NOT the sister that she was hoping for. Next to my daughter is my mom – we get told that we look identical pretty much all the time.  Next to me is my grandma, and there in the middle is her mom – my great grandma.  Pretty cool to get a picture with 5 generations of women all together! 

Almost 2 years ago we went as a family down to Australia to celebrate my great grandma Kitty’s 100^th birthday.  We were a little bit late because of COVID restrictions and she was actually closer to 101 but it was such a treat to get to introduce my kids to their great great grandma.  Grandma Kitty is pretty feisty. One of my favorite stories of her is that in the middle of COVID in Australia they had restrictions that made it so that you were only allowed to go to the grocery store on particular days based on where your name fell in the alphabet or something like that.  One day she told my grandma that she was pop down to the shops and my grandma said, “Mom, you can’t do that, it’s not your day to be allowed to go!”  My great grandma replied, “I’m 99 years old, what are they going to do to me?  I’ll just act confused and tell them ‘Oh sorry love, I don’t understand all these new protocols.’ and they’ll let me shop.”  Don’t stand between an old lady and the grocery store when she wants to go!  She was still living on her own when we went to visit her at 101 and I think she’s amazing. I hope to grow up to be every bit as independent as she is – and to live as long!

I don’t know how many people have personally known their great grandparents personally but when I was born I had 5 of my 8 great grandparents still living – I’m the oldest child of an oldest and 2^nd oldest child so the gaps are a little more condensed.  On the other hand my husband is the youngest of 9 kids – his great grandparents were long since gone by the time he came around.  Only our oldest two children were able to meet his last living Grandma, but they were too little to remember even that meeting. 

A great grandparent might seem fairly removed from you personally if you haven’t had them in your life, but my great grandparents are people I feel very connected to.  I can remember my Grandma Bonnie playing sports with her grandkids.  I remember my Grandpa Tom whistling for the lorikeets in his backyard.  I remember my Great Grandpa Anderson visiting our home in California and insisting on working in the yard – despite being well into his 90s and my mom being convinced it would be the thing that killed him and that the family would hate her forever.  I remember the raspberries in my Grandma Arlene’s backyard that we would pick while my parents would visit with them inside. 

These are very real people.  Despite Grandma Kitty being the only one of those great grandparents still alive – she’s kicking around now at 102 – I know that all of them were invested in me while they were here on earth – and I can’t imagine that investment disappeared just because they passed through the veil.  I think of my relationships with my own kids.  I may not know a lot about what happens in the next life but I do know that it would take a lot more than death to erase the love I have for them.  We may not remember these people but I know that they remember us and I am certain that they play a very active role in our lives, even though we don’t necessarily always see their hands in our lives.

For the next part of my presentation we did a little role playing activity that got people really involved. We had handed out little slips of paper with short stories of some of my actual ancestors. Everyone that had been assigned a role came up to the podium (we were in the chapel) and we assigned one side of the podium to be spirit prison and the other to be spirit paradise.

If I had a little more time I would have tried to have the people who came up be from real families that matched the roles of the families – i.e. one of the families in my script was a mother, father and two daughters. I would have liked for it to have been an actual couple in our ward with two daughters and have them stand up as a family – but my casting time was limited. It worked out beautifully even without doing that though and the experience was awesome all together.

I had the individuals come up to the microphone in order (the slips of paper are numbered) and they would read their little story. Just a few lines about their name, where they lived, something cool about them. At the end of the story they would ask – “Does anyone have my name?” Before the meeting had started we handed out slips of paper with a picture of the temple and a name of one of the ancestors to youth in the audience. If the name was in the audience the youth could come up to the podium and bring the ancestor from spirit prison to spirit paradise.

I intentionally structured the script so that the first whole family was all easily accounted for and they all made it to spirit paradise. You could tell that people were starting to get a little kind of giggly from the hokey representation. Not irreverent or anything just it was kind of fun to take people from spirit prison to spirit paradise and it was a little silly. Then as one particular brother got up he got to where he asked, “does anyone have my name?” and you could tell that it hit him. If no one out there had his name, he couldn’t go on. It changed the mood just a bit as the weight of it was felt a little more.

The second family that I had selected was a couple with two daughters. As we went through there was someone who had the name of the father. Someone who had the name of the mother. Someone who had the name of the first daughter… but no one had the name of the second daughter. She had to go back to spirit prison. Suddenly you could tell things got a little more real for the class. Oh… wait. You mean without someone to take her she doesn’t get to go to spirit paradise? Oh…

The next family wasn’t found at all, and the feeling was sadder still as a whole family didn’t get to go on to the other side. The last family was that of my Grandpa Tom. He had done his own work during this life so he got to go on to spirit paradise but he was trying to connect with his biological father that he hadn’t known and his son that he was estranged from in this life. The father and son weren’t able to get up and go to the other side.

While we were all sitting there I got up and told everyone how I was feeling. Of course it was happy to see so many people making it to spirit paradise. But no matter how many people made it, I was still infinitely sad about those who were left behind! Sure that second family had gotten 3 out of 4 members to the other side. Hey in school 75% is a passing grade! But oh, if that one left behind had been my child… it would count as a zero to me. I can’t imagine a happiness in the next life that involves leaving any one of my children behind. Seeing the people left in spirit prison was heart breaking.

After we sat with this for a minute I had my mom get up after this and explain why these people weren’t found at first and how we did eventually find them through family history work.

The first family I shared was the family of my 4th great grandfather Ira Allen. Ira joined the church in 1845. The family that we had stand up were representing his parents and siblings. All of their work had been done back in the 1800’s. They were easy to find because they were people that Ira would have known personally and he made sure their work was done himself.

The next family was that of my 3rd Great Grandfather Joseph Cabella. He was a ship’s captain that was lost at sea in 1847. His wife was pregnant at the time but the baby only lived for a few months after birth. The mother lived for 4 years longer before leaving their first child – who was only 8 years old at the time – an orphan. The father, mother and oldest daughter were easy enough to find – their oldest daughter was my 3rd great grandmother and her parents show up in the records plenty. Their work had all been completed in the late 1960s and 1970s. The baby though wasn’t obvious to find. She doesn’t show up on census records, she had no children of her own – there was no one to carry on her legacy. My parents found her through good old fashioned detective work. They felt like they ought to take another look at this family and really comb the records to make sure there was no one that was missed. Luckily Cabella isn’t a very common last name so searching records in their area for that last name inevitably pulled up relatives, the trick was just finding how they fit. As they did this they came across a birth and death record for Rose. She never appeared on any census but she still appeared in those records. Her work was finally completed in 2010. At this point in the presentation I was going to have “Rose” stand back up and ask “does anyone have my name?” I had a friend in the audience who was handing out the names of these lost people who could then have them come forward and take them to spirit paradise. Unfortunately, we ended up being strapped for time and that kind of got skipped but that was the intention.

Cyril Challoner’s family was more recent. He is the cousin of my great grandfather – one of the few great grandparents that I did not get a chance to meet in this life. While the other people that I highlighted were direct ancestors of mine, Cyril was a little more lateral. He, his wife and daughter were all killed during the bombings on England during WW2. They have no living descendants today. The only way they could be found was for us to explore more of our family tree than just our direct line.

The final family that we highlighted was my great grandfather Tom Smith. I talked about him earlier as the grandpa that I remember whistling for lorikeets in his backyard in Queensland Australia. You would think his genealogy would be super straightforward – he was a genealogist up until his death in 2014! We had the Smith line covered way way back and thought we were just working on branches that were going to be really hard to fill in because the records from so long ago would be difficult to find.

Then, after my grandfather’s death my mom did an Ancestry.com DNA analysis. Her report came back that she had Russian Jewish ancestry. Huh? How could that be? Slowly she was able to piece together that her biological great granddad was not the man that her great grandma was married to. Through a series of digging through records, comparing pictures, and talking with DNA matched relatives she determined that Tom Smith’s dad was actually Leopold Hirschberg – a sailor who was living in Liverpool, England at the time. Tom’s middle name of “Lusitania” suddenly made sense as his father survived the sinking of the Lusitania the year before his birth.

We actually found mention of Leopold in a book called Wilful Murder: The sinking of the Lusitania, however at the time he was using the name Leonard Thompson as a means of avoiding prejudice against his Jewish heritage. He was tricky to find with different names and no records that would confirm his identity but it was fascinating as we put some of these puzzle pieces together. We had joked for years that Grandpa Tom looked a lot like Tevya from Fiddler on the Roof and it was interesting to discover that we weren’t far off – his ancestors came from a town very similar to Anatevka. This has opened up a completely different line of research for putting together our family history.

This finding of Jewish ancestry was especially interesting to me. As I had named my children I’d felt very strongly drawn to specifically Hebrew names for them. It wasn’t anything intentional, but when I looked back I could see that I’d decided to give them names like Samuel, Daniel, Esther, & David. You know what names we found in this lost branch of our family? Yup, all the same ones. My older boys have had the opportunity now to go to the temple and do the baptisms for ancestors that share their names – ancestors that I didn’t even know about when I gave them those names.

The DNA analysis also started connecting my mom with cousins that she didn’t recognize. A little bit of sleuthing uncovered that during his military service in WW2 my grandfather had fathered a son in Ireland. The boy had spent his whole life searching for his dad but never connected to him. He had passed away before his father. We believe that this whole crew of estranged fathers and sons has been connecting on the other side and making up for the lost time they never got to have on earth. It has been an honor to reconnect them and restore these lost ties.

I hope that watching these examples has helped you see how you can start to connect to your deceased loved ones.  These are real people, even if we don’t remember them anymore.  If you’re familiar with the movie Coco you understand the sentiment that you die twice – once when your heart stops beating and once when there is no one on the earth who still remembers you.  Through reconnecting our families and taking those family members to the temple we help make it so that these people are not forgotten.  I would like to discuss some of the ways that we can make deceased loved ones feel real. 

One of the ways that I have found has been a simple change of semantics.  I no longer take names to the temple – I always take friends.  Now I know this sounds kind of hokey, and I will admit that when I started doing this, I felt really dumb about it.  But I have forced myself to always talk about these people as friends rather than names.  Whenever I’m ready to go to the temple I call up my mom and ask her if she has any of her friends that she wants me to take to the temple.  I will tell you that even if I felt dumb calling them friends, after doing the work to find these people, learn their stories and put them back together – my mom feels zero irony when I ask her for a friend. 

Whenever I can I try to have my mom tell me a little bit about the person whose work I am doing.  At the very least I try to look at the card and see where they were from and how long they have been waiting for me to take them to the temple.  While I’m waiting I try to at least take a second to close my eyes and say hi to them and let them know that I’m excited to be with them that day.  My 13 year old son recently went to the temple after having my mom give him a little bit of information about the people he was doing work for.  He came back telling me how much better it made the experience when he’d done the work to find someone himself.

If you think you can’t take a family name to the temple because you haven’t been doing the research yourself – you’re probably wrong! It has never been easier to find a friend from your own family to take to the temple. I was going to record a video to show you how to do it but I found this one that someone else had already taken the time to make. So I’ll let them do the explaining, but it’s less than a 2 minute video – and it literally doesn’t take any more time than this to get family ordinances on your phone. I have done it on the way to the temple and they have printed it for me when I arrived. I don’t think they could make it much easier!

Ok, now that you have a name you need a time to go to the temple. I feel like we’re all busy and finding the time is one of the hardest parts of getting to the temple.  I’m going to put in a quick plug for Ward Temple Night, if you have it in your ward.  I was able to attend ward temple night just before giving this presentation and as I sat there I kept thinking “I really hope this is what heaven is like!”  I love attending the temple, I love the peace that is there and the chance to serve, and just being somewhere with no one climbing on me for a little while.  But attending with our ward was even better. 

As I walked into the chapel I saw sisters from our ward who scooted over and made sure there was a place for me.  I was able to watch as a few other sisters walked in. Literally with each person who walked in that I knew my heart swelled with happiness to see them there in the temple.  It’s always great to go – but it’s even better when you can go and feel that love and connection with each other too.  As I felt the happiness of seeing members of our ward family in the temple it made me think of how it must feel to see friends and family reunited on the other side of the veil and how much more excited we will be to see each other there. 

So, if you’re looking for a good time to go to the temple – it’s much more fun going with your ward.  If your ward doesn’t have a ward temple night, or the night they have doesn’t work for you – find a friend! My oldest boys are homeschooled and so are home during the days. They made a goal to go to the temple weekly and we scheduled it in our calendar. Then we decided to invite some other homeschooled kids in our neighborhood. We now take our whole van full of boys to the temple once a week! It’s wonderful for my boys to not only serve in the temple, but to get to do so with friends.

If you haven’t gone to the temple recently it might feel intimidating to navigate the new scheduling process. I promise it’s not hard! Here’s another video that shows you the process. It’s only 71 seconds long, so there’s no excuse to skip over watching this if scheduling an appointment has been keeping you from getting to the temple!

Ok, now we get to what I was *actually* asked to share, which is how to share memories on Family Search… which I never got to. The Temple & Family History committee wants me to give the other “half” of my presentation, but I’m going to have to put together a lot more to really make this into a full presentation like they’re looking for (so… stay tuned, that’s probably coming 😂) My mom has used the memories feature to upload pictures that she inherited from her parents of her ancestors. Using those pictures she’s been able to find people she didn’t know she needed to look for. There will be people in pictures from a wedding or other event and she will look and say “ok, I know who this is, and who that is… but this person looks like they are probably family – see they have the same nose and smile…. hmmm.” Then she knows to go piece together clues until she can find out who it is. If you find a family picture with 5 kids, but you only have 4 kids in the records, it looks like it’s time to do some research!

Being able to read the memories about those who have come before is a powerful way to bring them to life and appreciate all that has gone into putting you where you are today. In Family Search you can now upload your memories, photos, records etc. in a place where they will be preserved and shared with others who connect with your family. Below is a quick video that explains how to do this.

I hope you’ve caught a little bit of the vision of why family history is important to you. Maybe you’ve found some way that you can be a part of it.  I hope that you will go out feeling like these are real people and not just names on the page.  I bear my testimony that I know that that is true.  I know that the work that we do in temples is so important. We need our ancestors and they need us.  Life and salvation are a group project.  In D&C 128:15 we read “And now, my dearly beloved brethren and sisters, let me assure you that these are principles in relation to the dead and the living that cannot be lightly passed over, as pertaining to our salvation. For their salvation is necessary and essential to our salvation, as Paul says concerning the fathers—that they without us cannot be made perfect—neither can we without our dead be made perfect.”  I know our Heavenly Parents love us. They love those who have come before us and those who will come after us.  The Plan of Salvation is such a gift. It will not be complete until we have connected the whole human family.  What a privilege it is to be a part of this great work.  I leave these things with you in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.

Resources

If you would like to use the materials I put together for our 5th Sunday lesson you are welcome to do so. If you can I would recommend talking to people in your own ward who have their own experiences with tracking down lost family members. It’s much more powerful to share personal experiences and I promise you that you have similar experiences in your ward too. I aimed to have 4 different types of families represented –

• A family that was super easy to find – clear records, everyone accounted for right off, no problems at all
• A family where *most* of the family was easy to find, but someone was left out and discovered later
• A family that was very difficult to find because they have no one left on earth that is their posterity
• A family with some tricky connections that we could only find through DNA matching and comparing memories & photos

You obviously don’t have to follow my family sets but I was aiming for people who could be found through totally different methodologies to highlight that there isn’t just one way to do genealogy. It would be really cool if you could get these examples from different people in the ward and highlight how the ancestors are connected to your own ward members. I was working on this presentation on my own but if you have a committee it could be fun to see different people’s research.

However, you are of course welcome to just use the ones that I’ve already put together. Included below are the Power Point presentation that I used, the script that I put together for the “does anyone have my name” section, “temple names” to go with the participation section, and a blank set of “temple names” if you choose to put together your own script.

Role Play Instructions

If you want to do the “Does anyone have my name” section here are the steps that I would take to keep everything organized –

1. If you are using your own family history experiences, I would recommend writing out your script and putting numbers in front of each person’s part and the gender of that person. This makes it easiest for keeping everyone in order and making it easy for casting to not have to read through the whole part to determine whether to give the part to a man or a woman.
2. Once you’ve made your own script use the fillable PDF to create “temple names”. I’ve made the name cards with a spot for the name, birth date/place, and death date/place. At the bottom I have a spot where you can put the gender (again, this makes it a lot easier for casting when you get to teaching the lesson), and stage. The stage lets you know when to hand out the cards. I’ll explain my stages in a second.
3. Whether you’re making your own script or using mine – print both the script and the temple names file that you are using. I would recommend having 2 scripts so that you have one on hand to follow along during the presentation
4. Cut 1 copy of the script and the temple names into strips so that you can hand them out
5. Before your lesson starts hand out the script strips and the temple names that either say “SELF” or “Stage: 1” – DO NOT HAND OUT STAGE 2 YET!
   • SELF: These temple names are for people who would have completed their own temple work in their lifetime. These should be handed to the same person who gets that part of the script (in my script this would be Thomas Smith & Ira Allen). They completed their work in this life so they don’t have to wait for someone else to come forward with their name
   • STAGE 1: These temple names are the people who are easy to find and their work is completed right away
   • STAGE 2: These temple names are the people who were difficult to find and won’t have their work completed until after you explain the work that went into finding them
6. Choose someone who can be in the audience who can hand out the Stage 2 names during the presentation AFTER you’ve completed the script. It really helps to have someone who understands the whole presentation so they know when to hand these out

Files to download