We went in for tithing settlement today & one of the things they mentioned was that they wanted everyone in our ward to check out the new Family Search website from the church.
After we got home I pulled it up & was amazed to see how much information was in there on my family lines.
Here's the link:
http://new.familysearch.org
You'll need your membership number (check your temple recommend or ask your ward clerk) and your confirmation date to create a login, but once you're in, the site is amazing!
It lets you see all the temple work that's been done for your relatives, shows you any that hasn't been done, and shows you any work that's in progress.
It also shows you everyone's contribution to the Church's massive family history file on your family lines.
Here's a few of the cool things I ran across:
1) My great grandma day (Myrl Rowley) was 14 years younger than her husband.
Wow! And I thought my 6 year gap between my wife & I was big.
To give you some perspective, her husband died when he was 76....she was 54.
She then lived clear into her 90's. Yep. That's a mightly long time to live without a spouse! Maybe that's why she was so grumpy sometimes, eh?
2) My Blair line goes clear back to 1135 A.D.
22 people back from me.
His name was William de Blair
Born either in 1135 or 1159 AD
In Blair, Ayrshire, Scotland
Died in 1214
So I got's a wee bit of Scottish in me laddy!
3) Lot's of James Blair & David Blair in the family line.
So my brother David and my cousin James have very "Blair" names.
4) Lot's & lot's of HUGE families on both sides.
Alonzo Brinkerhoff was one of 9 kids.
He himself had 12 kids.
And each of those kids had lots of kids (My great grandpa Brinkerhoff had quite a few himself)
My Great Grandpa Blair (James Blair) was one of 10
5) My Brinkerhoff line went clear back to 1547
(Back then they spelled it Brinckerhoff)
His name was Abraham Brinckerhoff & was born in The Netherlands
6) On the Day line (my mothers father), I don't have to go back very far to hit England.
My Great Great Grandpa Day, Francis Day, was born in Luton, Bedfordshire, England in 1846
Died at 92 in Eager, Arizona. Nice, long life
7) The Newell line has a TON of ancestors in Massachusetts, long before the US was a nation
And on and on and on....
If you have a chance, log in & check your relatives. It's amazing how much history is in there. Kind of makes my PAF file look like a speck of dirt compared to how well maintained the church's online file is.
It's also pretty cool because if the work hasn't been done yet, you can print out a paper & take it with you to the temple & perform the work right off of the form.
The temple updates the master file online and soon the Family Search file will show that the work has been done. All in all, a really, really cool resource!
Check it out!
-Graydon
5 comments:
I was finally able to log on for the first time last week and I'll agree. It was really cool. The only thing I found kind of annoying was that I couldn't look at Taylor's line at all because he's still alive. I would have to search from one of his dead ancestors. Oh, by the way, I think you got the math wrong with your grandparents. If your grandma was 14 years younger than your grandpa, she would have been 62 when he died.
That is pretty cool! We've been on that for awhile but haven't done much with it yet. We just started a family history class during Sunday School. Ironically I was just looking at our line through Grandma Whitaker (Coombs) and found a few Brinkerhoffs. It was interesting because our former Stake President, who is now an Area Authority Seventy, is a Brinkerhoff. Actually, Grandma dated his dad after high school.
Yep. You're right. I was just guessing at the math in my head (never been my strong point).
I'd imagine we're related to the Brinkerhoff then. If I remember right, the little town she was from was near Emery; which is where most of the Utah Brinkerhoff's came out of.
cool. Sounds like we've been around for a long freakin' time. And at the rate we're multiplying we'll be around forever :)
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