family history excitement

I have found my new favorite thing to do: family history!

My dad is the first one in his family to join the church (and currently only one other person is a member) which means that there has been virtually no one else to do temple work for all of his ancestors. Its pretty cool because it means that we get to do their work!

So, several years ago my dad and I went through a lot of different sources he had and traced his patriarchal line back many generations. We also had a lot of information about some of his great and great-great and great-great-great grandparents and their families but the farther back generations all we knew was the patriarchal line. There were a LOT of blanks. 

BUT then recently my dad found this website that has a lot of family history lines from Canada. My family came from France originally, and then was in Canada for a couple of centuries. This website is a gold mine! I think my dad said it has somewhere around 15,000 names for my family, displayed all nicely in a family tree.  It is so exciting!! I've done a lot of the data entry so far, and filled in several hundred family names. My dad has been working on getting the names submitted for the temple work and I just have to say that I am totally hooked! It is so exciting to see the family pedigree chart expand and get filled in, and enter in all of these names of my ancestors, knowing that they have been waiting for so long to have their work done. I think that as I've entered names and worked on things, I've definitely felt some of their excitement and happiness from where they are.

My dad is a lot more in tune and perceptive to the spirit, and he's had some pretty cool experiences working on this too. This week as he was getting some names ready to submit, he came across one individual that had a rather weird name (I think the name was Domitilde.) and I didn't know whether it was a boy or a girl so I had left it as "unknown." He saw that, and couldn't tell whether it was a boy or a girl either. So he sat there thinking "hm, well how am I going to figure out what gender this person is?" And as he was sitting there thinking about that all of a sudden he felt/heard, "I'm a girl! And I want my work done!" He was a little surprised by this, but he indicated on the record that this person is female, and then stopped to confirm that this was correct and heard/felt again "Yes, I AM a girl and I really want my work done!" Well all right then! Apparently after this, my dad described it as "the floodgates kind of opened" and he heard/felt all sorts of other people that were all clamoring for him to get their names submitted and their ordinances completed too. Really cool stuff.

When I go out to Minnesota this summer I'm planning on sitting down with my dad and having him show me how to get the names ready for temple submission, so that I can help do that too.

One other thing both Matthew and I have been doing is Family Search Indexing. If you're not aware, basically its just transferring pictures of old microfilms of census data into typed, computer data. It's a easy, simple, pretty fun and important way that anyone can contribute to family history work, even if you don't have a way to do your own family history information. Just a little plug for indexing :) Here's the link: Family Search Indexing.