One More Reason to Do Your Family History

This last Sunday at church I had an interesting impression during Sunday School. Currently my wife and I are enrolled in a Family History and Temple Work class. As we talked about why it is important for us to do family history work, I began to imagine what doing family history work might be like a hundred years from now.

I imagined my great-grandson attending a family history class like the one I was attending. Feeling inspired after church, he goes home and begins filling out a four generation pedigree chart. He does this by looking at old Facebook profiles. He can see pictures of me and read about my life. He can see that I was happily married. He can see who my parents are and see pictures of them. He can even see pictures of my grandfather, but the pictures of my grandfather do not link to another profile. He stares longingly at the photo of his great-great-great-grandfather wishing he could know more about him.

Facebook began in 2004. It only holds profiles of a portion of our families and a minute fraction of the family of God. Perhaps some people in the future, will struggle to do family history work because they will hit a wall after reviewing old social media profiles and whatever other records they can access online.
Now, I don't know that Facebook will really still be around a century from now, and I don't know what the world will be like, but I can imagine that record keeping might be very different in a hundred years than it is today. We use Facebook and other social media platforms to record our lives. Many people do not keep hand written journals anymore.

We live in a transitional period. Technologies that are emerging in our lifetimes will likely be heavily integrated into the lives of our decedents. They might not understand the "old and outdated" technologies that we are presently accustomed to using.

Just think about how often you get physical prints of the photos you take now compared to twenty years ago. When I was a kid, we had a film camera; the only way to get those pictures was to have the film developed. Now with digital cameras, we tend to store our photos on drives, and view them there. I'm willing to bet you've even seen those framed screens that display digital images. Photos don't need to be printed in order to be enjoyed anymore. Photos are just one example of how our lives are documented. Who knows what will change in the next twenty years let alone the next one hundred?

We live at the crossroads of the old and new ways of doing things, and I believe that we are to use this to our advantage. We understand what the world was like prior to the digital age because we experienced it. We know what it's like to not be able to find information online because the Internet used to not exist. I believe that this is one reason why we have a special obligation to do family history work right now.

I'm not suggesting that in a hundred years people won't still read hard copies of books and print out photos, or that we cannot teach the skill of analyzing old documents or provide some understanding of what the world was like before the Internet. I'm just suggesting that the way that family history work is done in a hundred years will probably be different than how it is done now, and our descendants might not have access to the same resources and "old" technologies in the future that we currently have access to. That access could be as complicated as them having a different understanding of what it means to keep a record or as simple as the fact that things get lost over time.

The nice thing about my impression is that I get to decide how the story ends. My great-grandson does not not need to be left wanting if I work now to collect stories and photos of my ancestors. I'm also not suggesting that we should make Facebook profiles for all of our ancestors. In fact, your ancestors already have profiles on familysearch.org.

Family Search allows you to upload images or write stories about your ancestors. If you have physical photos and documents, someone in your ward can probably help you scan them onto your computer. If not, collect all the information you can about your ancestors and enter it in there. There may be family history work that only you can do, so go out there and do it. We may not understand how valuable our efforts are in our lifetimes, but I believe they will be very meaningful to our posterities.