Tuesday, September 19, 2006

It Was A Happy Night

I had a lady write to me last week after visiting my online family tree, asking about Archie Newton Watson and Doris (I had her first name as "Daisy") Audrey Simpson. FOUND 'EM TONIGHT. Doris' family lived in the same place for over 40 years. Ahhhh... I love it when they do that. I was able to send the lady four census images and Archie's WWI draft registration card image. Love the unlimited access to Ancestry.com at the FHC. LOVE it.

THEN... along came a sister from the other stake who needed some help finding information in the IGI. I hooked her up with PAF Insight and sat with her for over an hour, helping her plug in the new information she found. It turns out that Bri dated her cousin in Tri-Cities, where she's from. Small world. She was very happy about the results and asked if I would be there next week. Yay!

In the meantime, a fellow staff member was helping a young man find a relative and coming up empty, so I joined them on another computer and BAM had a census records in just a few seconds. YES. My staffer teased me about not puffing myself up. I was like, "you're welcome."

I love helping people. I was thinking about doing this as a business but it's so much more fun to give it away for free. :) Who knows, maybe I still will... but as long as I have this calling, I think not.

Friday, September 15, 2006

Last Night's FHC Meeting

What an interesting time it was... and may I just observe, there's nothing like going to a Family History Center staff meeting to make me feel like a fetus. Sister R. even said, "I've been serving at the FHC for 30 years now... I started when I was the age of that young lady right there" and pointed at me. It was a wonderful thing to hear after the conversation I recently had with my mom - "My baby girl's going to be 40!" THANKS. She's just lucky she doesn't have anyone around saying, "My baby girl's going to be 60!"

Sister R. talked to us about the recent changes the Church has made about our program. For one thing, we're no longer "staff members" belonging specifically to the FHC - we're Family History Consultants now, and our responsibilities reach farther. We now belong to our respective wards and work under the jurisdiction of the HP group leader. We'll not only continue to work our shifts at the FHC but will also work in our wards, going into the members' homes to teach them how to do family history work.

Since I was already teaching the family history Sunday school class, my job isn't going to change that much - and going into the ward members' homes was on my agenda to start doing. All of the FHC staff members from our ward will be meeting with the bishop on Sunday to talk about it, and at that time Blaine & Marilyn will probably opt out, as she is also the RS Education counselor. Which means they won't be working with me on Tuesday nights anymore. I'm sad about that.

Then we learned exactly how to enter names, dates, and places in PAF. And even I, who have considered myself a stickler about this, learned a few new things - things I'll have to go into my PAF file and correct. YOWZA. How humbling. ;)

I've received a few emails regarding my Rootsweb family tree, so I need to go through and check those out as well, and probably upload a new one soon. I also found out that my grand-aunt Irene passed away this week and will be keeping an eye out on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer online to see if I can catch her obituary. She had Alzheimer's disease and I imagine she must be quite a bit happier now that she's with her husband, parents and other loved ones. With all this and the new PAF data entry fixes, I have a lot to keep busy with.