Family History

Here's a little snippet about me as a person and something I am very excited and passionate about: DOING GENEALOGY! I've loved doing my Family History work since I was a little kid. I was fortunate that my grandmother had recorded a decent amount of her husband's line years and years ago. She was able to contact grandparents and great grandparents for letters and information that they could verify going back with certainty to 1818 and with some question marks all the way back 1690. I loved doing genealogy so much that I actually worked on memorizing the names, birthdays and locations of as many direct ancestors as I could (which actually was a habit that paid off later on during my mission for the Church).

I'm not going to bore you with a detailed history of my ancestors (though I'm more than happy to provide some) but I am excited to show just how much information you can find going back to the early 1600's and even farther. I'll also share a little bit of why genealogy means so much to Mormons (Latter Day Saints).



Ok, Mormons first: to a Latter Day Saint, Family History work is more than just researching ancestors and stories. It's the start building a better family, not just during mortality but for forever. The Mormon concept of family (not the traditionalist political version) is that parents, siblings, children  etc. can be "sealed" or connected (a "sealing" is a specific ceremony performed inside an LDS Temple specific to create this connection) to each other with a bond that makes death meaningless to a family relationship. The idea is that when a family is "sealed" they are able to maintain their "rights" as a family in the afterlife. It is a somewhat complex doctrine and there are often a lot of questions, all over the Church there are members who are still trying to learn the finer points of just how "sealings" work both on Earth and in Heaven. I won't try to explain the details here, since I'm just trying to give an overview; so as a sort of definition you can say that a "Forever Family" or "Eternal Family" is one that stays together even in death, which normally separates family members (a traditional marriage often states: "Till Death do you part" while a Mormon "sealing" does not). Genealogy is the tool used by Mormons to record their ancestor's information and is the start of the "sealing" process that occurs inside the Temple by volunteers (specifically, worthy Church members). If you'd like to read in some more detail about the various steps toward "sealing" and the basic function of "Temple Work" you can click HERE for the official LDS produced pamphlet called Preparing to Enter the Holy Temple.

A Sealing Room from the Payson Utah Temple

So for a Mormon, Family History Work isn't just a hobby it's a part of the core beliefs and doctrines that make the Church what it is. Those beliefs definitely shaped and encouraged my personal interest in the work and in my ancestors themselves. Believe or not, while I was growing up we actually had a very difficult time with our genealogy, the information was hard to get and even harder to prove. Everything had to be done via textbooks and hard to use microfilm etc. Eventually though everything started getting put on the internet (yes I am that old) which made everything so much easier.

The Church has it's own family research website called Family Search which makes coordinating Temple Work with genealogy easy but I'm not a personal fan of how easy to use the record and ancestral searching program is. I've also had some issues with recommended results being entirely incorrect and unrelated to me (which I can prove because of my grandmother's work and records). I've had much better luck using Ancestry for all of my searches and then simply send that information to my Family Search account for Temple Work purposes.

Genealogy can be really really hard sometimes, my family spent almost 20 years trying to verify the information we already had for the Edwards line that went back to 1690 but had almost no luck outside of hearsay. Finally while I was on mission I had an opportunity to do my weekly e-mails at the Church's local Family History Library. The volunteers there started helping us missionaries do some genealogy work and showing us the ropes, it was a lot of fun for I think all of us. But I turned out to be the most lucky, I used the names and information I had memorized to start poking around on Ancestry (with the help of one of the volunteers) and within 3 hours I had enough verified information to send 20 names to the Temple and some of those were new names that we had never seen before! Yeah, I was definitely super excited and shocked... after 20 years of stress and being stuck it definitely felt like a miracle to have everything I needed for 20 people fall right in my lap! Since then I've managed to expand into other family lines (different last names) and I've had huge successes.

The sheer amount of information you can find on your ancestors is shocking! On my father's side I found pictures of his great great great grandparents from the mid 1800's, when they immigrated to America from Germany. On my mother's side I have a lot more and more impressive information. I know her paternal ancestry (her father's ancestors) going to 1690 (still), and on her maternal side (her mother's ancestors I have back to 1650. I found out that I'm a descendant of Captain Peter Knight who owned his own ship in the 1650's and sailed back and forth between Jamestown, Virginia and England ferrying passengers and immigrants to the New World. He settled on the coast of southern Virginia where his family stayed for generations. I also found birth records for some Strader ancestors born in the early 1700's in what was then Hesse (a region famous for later having soldiers hired by the English during the American Revolution) and Westfalen (then part of Prussia).

I also found one ancestor in particular who was a Lieutenant in the British military and played a key role in pushing the Dutch out of what is now New York, he built an estate near Queens in the 1730's on land that is now La Guardia Airport. I have several ancestors who were POW's during the American Civil War kept by the Union (they lived in North Carolina and Virginia and so were Confederate soldiers). Those records were exceptionally well kept and I've found a treasure trove of information about how happened to my ancestors and what they were like. Sometimes I find injury records from that war; one ancestor was shot in the back and subsequently crippled for life, another was hospitalized for gonorrhea during the war etc.

I had one ancestral result that surprised me though, when it came to the sheer amount of information available on him. His name is John Emerson Strader, born 1828 and died in 1920 (yes that is really long time but my ancestors on that side are very long lived as a norm), he was a Civil War Veteran and actually was the one hospitalized for gonorrhea and was one of the POW's (talk about a rough enlistment). This is a photo of him later in life:

I was lucky enough to find not only photos of him and basic military records but I also found his official "Oath of Allegiance" card demonstrating his regained citizenship with the United States after the Civil War. This card tells me far more information about him than I usually find for my other ancestors. John was short and roughly my height (he was 5'7), he had somewhat darker skin and dark hair and notable grey eyes. I was really excited to find his eye color because I have somewhat grey eyes and it felt so good to know where and who I got those from!

I've had an absolute blast doing my family history work over the years, I admit it's been really hard and frustrating sometimes but I find it very rewarding every time I find something or someone new.

One last thing before I finish up, there's something that not everyone might be aware of. The LDS Church recently negotiated a partnership with three major genealogy companies: Ancestry, findmypast and MyHeritage. Members of the Church are now able to register for each of those sites for free! To be honest, that partnership was a lifesaver for me and what I was able to accomplish for my own family. So if you are a Mormon (even if you're inactive) just click the link to find out what you need to get started.

Best of luck continuing or getting started on your own Family History work! If you have any experiences to share feel free to leave them in the comment section!

Sincerely,
Samuel