I recently had a wonderful experience that illustrates the power of the memories feature in Family Tree to connect people.
First, to set the stage, over the course of many years I have compiled a history of my parents and our four ancestral lines back to our immigrant ancestors, gathering and sourcing the old family stories and conducting a lot of original research to complete the picture. It’s the kind of history that is laden with footnotes and sources, valuable to have but ponderous to read.
When Family Tree Photos and Stories was introduced, I found a great way to share my writing by breaking it into chunks, uploading life sketches and stories to Family Tree and connecting them to individual ancestors. I then added all the old ancestor photos my mother previously had stored in old shoe boxes.
Recently, a person was going through her deceased father’s old missionary papers and found a reference to a baptism he performed during his mission. His family had never heard about this baptism before. He had dictated his history to his family and mentioned only one baptism during his mission. She was curious about this additional baptism, and searched FamilySearch for the name of the person her father baptized.
She found a possible candidate, and saw in the Memories section a summary of the person’s life, including the story of his baptism as a twenty-year-old son of an inactive member of the Church, and photos of him. The location of his baptism matched the location where her father had served his mission. She contacted the individual who had uploaded all the information. That person turned out to be me.
I checked my genealogy files, and found notes I had written many years ago containing information about my father’s baptism. Sure enough, my father was baptized by the father of the person who contacted me. I affirmed to her that her father’s mission was a wonderful success, because generations of descendants of my father have been active and faithful in the Church.
Thanks to the photos and stories feature of FamilySearch Family Tree, she and I were able to connect and learn more about our fathers and their own connection as young men more than seventy years ago.
