Love this technology!!

I've been doing family history - genealogy it was called then - since the early 1960s. I remember writing a letter to a court house and waiting weeks for a reply if it came at all. They'd tell me how much the fee would be to send the birth/death/marriage certificate if they could find it. I'd send the check back. Weeks later, if I was very fortunate, the certificate would arrive in the mail. The wait was excruciating!

Today, we go on line to find those things, sometimes instantly, sometimes it just takes some searching. Family Search and Ancestry.com are two of my favorite places to be on any given day. And now the Church is just spilling forth constantly with wonderful new innovations to seek out our ancestors!

Just a quick preview of the fun stuff that is out there:

http://tinyurl.com/ldeeqin is the universal link to getting Ancestry, My Heritage, and newspaper.com free with your Family Search account if you are a member of the Church. If you have not yet received your e-mail telling you that you now have those premium websites free – this will get you into those programs.  I have been paying $300 a year for my International Ancestry subscription – and now you can have it for free!

https://familysearch.org/campaign/pioneer-ancestors  connects your family search account with pioneer ancestors you may have and gives you companies that crossed the plains with or stories about them. Very interesting!

The 3rd website is just pure fun! It’s the roots-fb.cs.byu.edu  link that will take you to a site that gives lists of famous people, prophets, presidents, royalty, infamous people, etc to show how you are related to them. The work is already done for you! Just open and enjoy!

The 4^th site is something you can do to give back for all this information now at your fingertips without any effort on your part! It is the Billion Graves project: you download the app to your smart phone or IPad, go to a cemetery,and take pictures of the gravestones. Those pictures will then be uploaded to their website and placed in their database for people find that information to provide more information for their family history. If you go to that site, it gives complete instructions on how it works.

The 5^th app that has me excited is the new Family Tree app for your smart phone and iPad. It is, of course, a free download and your pedigree comes up when you sign in with your family search account number. Now you can carry with you in your pocket or purse your entire family history! Everything that is in your family search account is there!

App #6 is the next really exciting app! The Church has a Memories app that you should download the same time you download the Family Search app.  You can take pictures with your smart phone of people, documents, or whatever and upload them right into your family search account.  Now you don’t have to have a scanner to add pictures to your files. Just take a picture, it gives you an opportunity to tag someone or something who is in your files, and it attaches it right there in your file. Amazing! It lets you crop it, fix it how you want – and if there are several people in the picture, it lets you identify each one of them, and then that same pictures is posted in each of their files. Just like Magic!

Elder Bednar's address this last week talked about today's social media and how it benefits us. This not only benefits us, but our ancestors!  Life just gets more exciting all the time!