The power of a shared family tree

I attended the May 30th Single Adults Family History Activity hosted by the Edmonton North Stake and Spruce Grove Stake. My role was to help participants with their family history. I experienced something that seems miraculous to me. 

One of the participants asked for help with his family tree. He had been using Ordinances Ready to print temple cards, but he wanted to do ordinances for his own family. 

When he signed into FamilySearch, I noticed that his tree consisted of 4 people: him, his mother, his estranged father and his father's mother. That was not much to go on, when public records of the most recent 100 years are unavailable to protect the privacy of living people. How could we bridge that 100-year gap?

We needed a few miracles. I asked if his parents could provide any additional information.  He agreed to phone his mother, and she was able to provide the information on her own parents and grandparents, and the names of his father's parents. These were the clues we needed to move forward. Google searches found obituaries and other helps. Each obituary provided birth and death information and identified the deceased person's parents and siblings. One clue led to another. With lots of heavenly help, in less than 3 hours, his 7-generation fan chart looked as complete as mine. For comparison, I have been working on mine for over 60 years!

There is absolutely no guarantee of this kind of success. The person I was helping had relatives on both sides of his family, who had previously added family members to Family Tree. We just needed to find them and connect him to them. This is part of the power of FamilySearch, where everyone is working on a shared family tree, instead of thousands of tiny separate family trees. Often, if you can add a few generations to Family Tree, it will connect to research that goes back much further.

I have a testimony of the power of family history and temple work to bless the living and the dead. The miracles continue and I want to be part of them. The Savior invites us to help in his work of bringing to pass the immortality and eternal life of man. 

- Bill Buchanan, Spruce Grove Stake Consultant