Family History

Usually, I inwardly groan when I hear about family history. It's not that I don't value it, I just don't really like it.
Well, that's not really true. I enjoy indexing and I love learning about family stories but the finding names or adding them or whatever, that part doesn't really fascinate me.

So, of course, that being said, I come to find out that for Youth Conference (a three day conference for youth) one of the "homework" assignments is finding a family name for an important activity*. I did it...and this time I actually had some fun. It was still (pretty) tedious working out some things but I kind of enjoyed it.

Family history can be a lot of fun. And it's not just finding and adding names. It includes indexing (transcribing old documents), learning/hearing and recording family stories, and just looking at your family names.

I think family history is kind of whatever you make of it, in a way. It can be really fun. So, I challenge you to just look at your family tree, family photos, whatever even if you just have a list of names. They're real people like you and me. It's really interesting what you learn and what names come up. For example, I found someone in a census and he had a housemaid. To add to that, a dog was later named about this housemaid. Go figure. I've also come across names like Ora (not a name you see every day) and Parthania (another name you don't hear everyday).
I think it's those things, the unique (and the more common names too) and the small, sometimes surprising facts, that make it worth it, at least to me.


*So, in case you're wondering, this important activity is baptisms for the dead. I'm a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Later-day Saints and we believe that even though someone has passed on, their baptisms can still be done by others through proxy.