A few weeks ago, I was asked to teach a lesson on why we do family history work. I based the lesson on a talk given by Henry B. Eyring at the April, 2005 LDS General Conference entitled “Hearts Bound Together” ( you can find the article at http://www.lds.org )
What I loved about this talk was that (then) Elder Eyring reminded us that the people we find when doing our genealogy research are real people. They lived upon this earth, had lives, families, dreams, hopes, ambitions, problems, character virtues and flaws, etc. In other words – they were just like us.
When we do our family history work, when we find the names of our ancestors, let’s take a minute to imagine them as real people – our friends, and our family. We can do this by learning as much about them as we can – more than just names and dates and places. We can find out what they did for a living, what churches they went to, what they said in their wills, what their journals said about them.
Family history gives us that complete picture of a person, more so than your basic “genealogy research” often does. Let us always remember that our ancestors weren’t that much different from us. Hope you enjoy the article!
