How It All Started

I want to share how all of this family history work started for me. Honestly, it starts in my childhood. My grandma had a microfiche reader in one of the bedrooms in her home. She would extract the information from various documents like census records and passenger lists. Apparently she was really good with the French records. I remember going over to her house and playing with it. I wish I had asked her to show me how to use it and what she was doing, but I had a feeling that it was something that I shouldn't be playing with and I didn't want to get in trouble!

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When I was in high school, my mom had all of the binders of family history work my grandma did on our family. There would be times when I would grab a binder and just go back through the generations that came before me.

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I've known for a long time that I need to get into doing my family history work, but I had no idea where or how to start. Being the procrastinator I am, I did nothing to figure it out. It was a Relief Society activity when I was still in the Single's Ward that finally got me in the right direction.

These are two of my friends that were in the

Relief Society presidency with me. I still remember that

we were talking about me and Jonathan because after

we were released we didn't see each other every week.

Dana and Leshelle were needing an update with how things were.

FYI things were looking pretty serious, but still no ring.

One part of the activity was learning how to index. That doesn't sound too impressive, but it is the 21st century version of what my grandma had been doing all those years ago. Indexing is a key to being able to search documents with ease. I quickly became addicted to doing it. This was the first solid step for me because I had to get a Family Search account.

I continued to index sporadically for the next few years. During this time my dad and his brother started going on summer adventures finding our living family members to try to piece together our family history. They've gone to quite a few states and the picture continues to get clearer with each trip they take.

This is the area my great-grandparents grew up.

In 2013, we moved back into Roseville Stake. That year, our Stake President challenged everyone to take an ancestor to the temple. I didn't know what I was doing or if I was doing it correctly. I found some family members and just let them sit in my reserved list. I was worried I did something wrong. Last March, I got back onto Family Search and started fresh. I was going to figure out how to take my family to the temple no matter what. I got the first group ready last summer and the rest is history!

This is the current group we are taking to the temple.

I am finding and taking my ancestors to the temple because of the example of my own family and the counsel of my church leaders. It has been such a blessing in my life. The blessing of going to the temple increase when we find and bring our family with us.