Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Serving A Family History Mission



Church Headquarters Campus
Family History Library
Church History Library
Joseph Smith Memorial Building
Church Office Building
Administration Building
Temple Square

Publishing this website is for me motivated by serving as a missionary at family history - church headquarters and my recent attendance at the  RootsTech Family History Conference.

For many years I have enjoyed working on my family tree. I seem motivated now to include working on life histories as part of my love of genealogy. Even though this will be a part time hobby I will try and regularly post relevant articles regarding my research. I will also post stories, sites, tools, and technology information I discover.

Kathleen and I are serving full time here in Salt Lake City. Kathleen is supporting questions from family history centers and training family history center directors. My assignment is involved in recruiting and processing people to serve part time and at home in family history service. We work in the Joseph Smith Memorial Building which is part of the Church Headquarter Campus. Please leave a comment if there is something we can do to help you.

The family names in the pages to the right are those including my Great Grandparents lines. The next generation includes: Osborne, Amick, Freeman, White, De La Garza, Oneal, Rich, and Kilbourne.

There are ways both members and those not members of the LDS church can serve. The family history libraries, indexing in general, and the 1940 census indexing project are area's anyone can serve.

We have about 500 church members serving 15 or more hours per week from home. These at home missions are becoming more important. We expect a need of 1000 more at home missionaries in the near future. Some of this is driven by the growing interest in genealogy, some will be driven when we open up the new Family Tree to everyone, and the need is great even now. At home missionaries go through two months of training. It consists of about 1.5 hours a day plus practice for those two months.  These are support callings. Questions are coming into church headquarter in such great quantities that the full time staff and missionaries just can't answer fast enough.  At home missionaries login and take the questions for help. 

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