You're Wrong About Family History

Family History.

How often do we hear that term and do a cringe of guilt?

Well I'm here to tell you -

Cut it out.

Stop skirting around it and thinking of it as this huge project full of dusty boxes or miles of indecipherable handwriting.

Family history is so much more than that.

I've recently tried to improve my family history efforts, and just today I found so much information on one of my family lines that trickles out early on FamilySearch.. It is so exciting to connect people, to attach sources, to see their gravestones and realize you finally have an exact death date for Jacob, or Anna's maiden name.

Just today, www.findagrave.com helped me find tons of information on my great-great-great-great grandpa, his children, and his children's spouses.

And it took under an hour.

The more sources, obituaries, gravestones, and records I find, the more these ancestors become real people in my mind - people who share my blood, people whose love is the only reason I exist.

This is about way more than names or green temple icons.

Quote by Linda Hogan

Family is beautiful, full of love, interesting, and connection-building.

Family history is the same thing.

Just look at this beautiful fan chart I made with Family Tree Prints!

I think this chart perfectly shows what that quote was talking about.

Just look at all the tiny names around the edge!!

All of those names are my ancestors, my family, my loved ones.

This is so much more than something to do on Sundays.

It is so much more than something you do out of guilt.

It is so much more than names, dates, and places.

This is what a forever family looks like.

This is what eternal happiness looks like.

That  fan chart is going to be framed on the wall in our living room - a daily reminder of who we owe our life and happiness to, and a daily reminder of what we can do to ensure that we are someday once again a forever family in heaven.