Day 16: I'm grateful for family history and the joy I get from working on my own and other's.
In detail:
I'm not sure why, but I have always been fascinated by family history (genealogy). Ever since I was a small child I've loved watching old home movies, looking at old family photos, or listening to stories about my ancestors.
I think the stereotypical age to become interested in genealogy is sometime after retirement. I started working with old school pedigree charts when I was 12. I'm 'only' 32 and I can say I've been working on my family history for somewhere around 20 years...
It has been amazing to see the development of the resources and technology available over the past 20 years. I remember the first time I walked into a family history center, armed with my paper pedigree charts and my floppy disks. I'm pretty sure the internet wasn't even involved at all. 20 years later I do almost all my research online, upload the information to the new.familysearch.org website, and can print temple ordinance requests online.
And the volume of information available in digitized records, worldwide, is pretty astounding. And it's growing every day.
I'm trying to teach myself not to work on family history late at night, especially on weeknights. There have been a few too many mornings where I asked myself, why did I stay up until 3am on Ancestry.com. And some of those times, I haven't even been working on my own family's history.
I think the thing that makes family history so special to me is the deep feeling that these aren't just names on a chart; these are real people. Who led real lives. And I am privileged enough to take a peek into their lives and get to know them a little.
And the icing on the cake: taking the names of my family members to the temple and completing the ordinances they didn't have access to during their lives. That experience is truly indescribably wonderful.
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