Video: Find Our Cousins song from lds.org

Just in case you need a little motivation.



You know the Church is serious about youth engaging in family history when they produce a song about it.

Descendancy research for when your family tree is "done"

My husband's family tree has been loved. His great uncle was a professional genealogist, his grandmother served a family history mission, almost all of his lines include Mormon pioneers who started doing genealogy in the 1800s. His closest unknown ancestor would have been born in the early 1700s. His genealogy is "done".

My husband and his parents

But it's not. Even if all of your direct ancestors have already been recorded (which is certainly not the case; there's always more to find), genealogy is the business of families - whole families. Your ancestors cared about their siblings, their aunts and uncles, and their second wives (or first wives!). They cared about all of their children - not just the one who happens to be your great-grandfather. Those children deserve to be researched.

I've posted before about how each of our ancestors could have hundreds of descendants. You can find them! It's called descendancy research.

The basic idea here is that you're trying to move forward in time instead of backwards. You pick one of your ancestor's siblings and try to find their spouse and children. Then you try to find all of their grandchildren and so forth.

If you want to see which descendants are already found, Puzzilla is a great resource. Puzzilla shows a simplified version of FamilySearch family tree. You can then choose an ancestor and view all of their descendants that are listed in family tree. By looking for gaps in your ancestors' descendant trees you can easily identify research opportunities.

Jessica used Puzzilla to find new research opportunities and bring names to the temple. You can read about her experience on her blog.

Is your family tree done? Have you researched any of your ancestor's descendants?

How (and why) to help youth find famous relatives

Once they've connected themselves to a deceased person on Family Search, many young people have a large family tree that they have never seen before. They love to explore it! For many youth the first thing they want do after they've set up their tree is to see if they can get back to Adam. Are there kings in there? Prophets? Explorers? Pioneers? They want to know.

You can help them find out. I'm all for letting them explore on their own, but there is another way. The BYU Family History Technology Lab has several different projects that interact with your Family Search family tree. One of them is called Relative Finder.

Relative Finder compares your family tree to various groups of famous people who are listed on Family Search; apostles, prophets, LDS pioneers, Mayflower colonists, European royalty, US presidents, anyone who has at least one line on their tree going back 10ish generations should be able to find something. Youth who do not have extensive trees are probably out of luck, but with a little bit of research they may be able to link back to a deceased relative that has a bigger tree.

William the Conqueror, my 29th great grandfather

How legitimate are genealogies that go back 29 generations? I don't know. Probably pretty questionable. In the end, we're all related to Adam anyway so if Amelia Earhart isn't really my 10th cousin, she's definitely in my tree somewhere else. It doesn't really matter if it's accurate or not. For youth there's nothing less exciting than their parents and if they think that their genealogy is full of people like their parents, what's the point of learning about it? The point of checking this site is to have them consider the possibility that there might actually be something exciting in their family tree.

Youth can learn anything they want to learn (adults too). If every family history experience they have is frustrating and boring, they won't come back. With so much to learn it seems counterproductive to waste time finding out that Joseph Smith is my 5th cousin 6 times removed, but it's fun. It gives them something to post and talk about. It helps them appreciate their ancestors and the other family genealogists. 

Give them some time to learn that regular people's stories are just as exciting. Once the genealogy fire is lit, they'll keep coming back to it throughout their lives. It's worth it to spend a little time kindling the fire.

Link: 5 ways to tell if your genealogy research is accurate

Have you ever had that moment when you realize that all of your family history research might be wrong? 

I certainly have. 

Census records contradict death records, other researchers have different information on their family trees, your mom remembers that her grandpa was from Ireland, but there's a birth record from Ontario. 

Many beginner researchers are surprised at the amount of uncertainty in genealogical research. Honestly, most of my genealogy is just a best guess based on the records I have been able to find. How do you make that best guess?

This article has some tips. Enjoy!

Googling your ancestors the smart way

It's always a good idea to google your ancestors. There are family history websites out there that are specific to certain surnames. People write blogs about their ancestors. There are government websites that allow you to search records that you can't find anywhere else.

But you need to be smart about it. Focus on one of the places that your ancestors lived.

For example, I've been trying to find records on the family of James and Rebecca McDonald. They emigrated from Ireland to New Brunswick in the 1830s or 40s, but I can't find them before the 1851 census and I don't know where in Ireland to look for them. I don't even know her maiden name. I've searched my family history sites with some success, but it never hurts to google, so I did.

I typed in "Alma, New Brunswick McDonalds"

Not the smartest search ever. But if I ever want some fries in Alma, I'll know where to go.

So I changed it to "Alma, New Brunswick genealogy" and eventually got a list of New Brunswick cemeteries. Here's Rebecca in the United cemetery in Alma, with a death date and a maiden name I didn't know before. Gone but not forgotten. 

I'm still a long way from tracing them back to Ireland, but a maiden name sure isn't going to hurt!

Photocredit: tiverylucky

Two important reasons to get in to genealogy before you get in to college

1. You can skip the identity crisis
I don't know if this is true for everyone, but I noticed a lot of "who am I" anxiety going on at college. Everyone is out on their own for the first time and they have to decide on their own opinions for the first time. They have to decide how to spend their time now that they're unsupervised. Genealogy can't tell you what your opinions are going to be, but it can allow you to stop worrying about it. When you know where you come from, you have a better idea about where you're going. Remember to interview your parents and grandparents before you leave home. It seems strange, but sometimes knowing that they've been through ups and downs too can put things in perspective for you and help you through the hard times.

2. Mad research skills
Some students assume that college is about proving what you know. That's not true at all. College is about finding the relevant information and then understanding it. It doesn't matter what discipline you choose, they just want to know if you can do that. If you do genealogy, of course you can! That's what genealogy is all about. Trying to find documents about your ancestors isn't that different from preparing a research paper. Research skills that you develop while doing your genealogy may seem a small thing, but they will put you way ahead once you get to college. So next time you are doing genealogy, just tell your parents that you're preparing for college.

Photocredit: Stockimages

I bet someone wrote a book about your ancestors

If you can track all of your ancestral lines back eight generations, to roughly the late 1700s, you will have almost 300 ancestors to keep track of (not including your ancestors siblings). It's a lot of people.

Have you ever thought about how many descendants your ancestors have? 

Members of the Church often tell me that, since they are the only member of the Church in their family, they don't expect any of their ancestors to have been baptized for the dead. Then, three or four generations back, they find someone that has. Who did that? One of the other descendants, who you probably don't know.

The number of ancestors you have doubles with each generation. So you have 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great-grandparents etc. But the number of descendants is multiplied by the number of children each of the ancestors had. So even though you only have 8 great-grandparents, if your great-grandparents had 10 kids, and each of their 10 kids had 10 kids, those great-grandparents could have hundreds of descendants.

And that's why...

There's absolutely, positively, most definitely no way you are the only genealogist in your family. Your family is massive. Bigger than you can imagine. Sands of the earth, stars in the sky big. Someone else out there cares about the same ancestors you care about. And I bet they wrote a book.

Here are some ideas for finding it:

1. Search a surname and place on FamilySearch books.

2. Read this amazing article about finding family history books using Google Books. 

3. Search the catalog at a local library near a place where your ancestors lived.

Books are great genealogy resources. They can jump-start or rejuvenate your research instantly. The people who write them are often part of local genealogical societies and have accessed records you don't even know that you don't even know about. These books don't show up on regular records searches, though, so you have to go looking for them.

Go on!

Photocredit: adamr