2024-10 Oct - Finding Cousins

Oct 3, 2024 family history cousins holocaust

Read time: Summary 0.2 minutes | Expanded section: 7.3 minutes | Entire message 7.5 minutes

Summary

Expanded Message

Upcoming October Stake Family History Celebration

Our Stake will host a community-wide and stake-wide Family History Celebration in October.

The director of the Family Search Center has the details. The Stake calendar shows it is from 10 am - 2 pm on Saturday, Oct 26th at the Stake Center.

Please drop by. You don’t have to stay the entire time. Stop by, whether for the popular local keynote speaker or for one or more of the many organized events.

Perhaps invite people in the community to come with you. It won’t be as big as Root Tech in Utah, but it is local. Local organizations are also participating. You’re sure to learn and even the kids will enjoy some of the events.

Story Time: A Woman found her family 76 years later

This interesting article describes how 80 years after the Holocaust, a genealogy test helped a woman find a cousin she never even knew was alive.

“Ann Meddin Hellman had all but given up hope that she would learn more information about her father’s side of the family — a lineage long-believed to have been erased in the horrors of the Holocaust. So it was a mix of surprise, shock and utter disbelief that followed when she learned five months ago she has an 83-year-old second cousin and Holocaust survivor living in Israel.”

A different story. What if this situation had been in your family’s history? This is a tenuous relationship to Family History, but I found it interesting anyway, so I’m sharing. A baby that changed a battle plan. My linkage to family history is that knowing what your ancestors went through and survived can help you feel not so alone or that you can handle more than we think we can. I don’t have many specific stories about my ancestors, so this story sparked some wondering “what if…?” reflection.

How a Solution to Momentary Frustration Ended Up Showing Me Cousins I Didn’t Know I Had

THE SETUP

When I first got started in Family History, and after I had finished copying my Granddad’s family history book data into FamilySearch.org, I tried to find other family members. I was still learning and so was slower then. I’m still less patient than ideal.

I found an aggravating pattern happened more often than I preferred (low patience, remember?). I would look for my people, my surname, and find a promising record or lead. I would then spend the time trying to find out if there was a link to my direct line, only to realize after spending “too much” time that that person is not in my direct line. So I would move on. Then to add salt to my patience wound, after a few months, having forgotten that name, I would “discover” that same lead again and go down that same rabbit hole again only to realize I had been there before. It felt like walking in circles without a compass (going in circles happens in dark, low visibility water when scuba diving too, unless you have a compass). The key is a compass.

One day while pondering the problem, I decided as a solution to just add those people’s page in FamilySearch.org even though they were not my line. They were still my surname. And besides I’d already spent the time ending up on their record. It only took a few moments to create a familysearch.org page for them.

Keep in mind that my goal, at the time, was to merely “flag” them as “I’ve already looked at this person” in my head, to prevent how many circles I walked/swam in. This habit went on haphazardly for some years.

During the pandemic, when we all had more time at home and I seemed to run out of other trails to follow, I spent more time doing this for my surnames in the USA. At some point, when I found one of them and a record also showed a living child or two, I added a page for them too (these pages only show up for me, not public, so no worries). Again, I thought I was doing this so I wouldn’t later “waste time” (my original rationalization) on people not in my own direct line.

Note: one really nice source is the US Social Security Numerical Index Files. These tend to show familial relationships in 99% of these records.

ASIDE: By the way, as a technical interlude, the graph database technologies used by FamilySearch.org and Ancestry.com now have far superior performance to mere relational databases of yore. A technology blessing to be sure. I’m not referring to bar charts as graphs. I mean graphs with vertices (nodes) and edges (relationships). An easy example is a family tree!

THE PAYOFF

Now, after having captured many more who have passed on with my surname in North America over a few years, I have recently started to notice big benefits.

It turns out that when networks scale that the connections become FAR EASIER to make. My experience with scaled networks is a microcosm of what makes the FamilySearch Human Family Tree approach so powerful. Today, for these others with my surname, I find linkages nearly immediately, and when I check my relationship to them I find they are nearly all cousins. Those efforts I started with low patience have resulted in faster connection-making now. I did not foresee this as a possible outcome then.

Given we are all sons and daughters of God through Adam and Eve, we are all related. The question is to what degree? The higher the cousin number, the lesser degree. 1st cousins are more close to my line than 20th cousins (I found a 20th cousin too!). Experts estimate the ENTIRE living human family is contained within 50th cousins!

For me, I have found many 6th through 13th cousins. Recently I started finding more 2nd and 3rd cousins (more closely related). No one in my immediate family knew these people either. It is exciting. More and more records have popped up for these people, confirming my hypotheses about them and their families.

The irony is that my initial and silly thinking of “not wasting my time” as a motivation actually turned out to bless me later because nearly 95% of those connections are a relation to some degree. The ~5% are unknown (so far) because they are still living and I cannot find their ancestors yet. I have gotten to know many cousins, expanding my view of our surname’s experience in America.

Even those few “living” persons have helped as I have found deaths in the last few decades that immediately linked to one of those pages, changing their status from living to deceased.

The irony continues as I have now seen the pattern emerge of the entire “my surname” clan arriving in America and seeing their migration paths moving westward. Like seeing the grand compass, I saw their migration patterns. I had seen this, at a smaller scale, in my own direct lines earlier. This new broadened view felt like it has expanded my vision for this work. It reminds me of Astronauts who having looked at the Earth from orbit have exclaimed that the boundary lines disappear and they see how all of us depend on this blue planet amid the darkness of space. How we’re all more connected than we realize on the surface.

Do you have to do this? No. Yet, for me, having experienced the blessings of this approach, I am glad I went through this experience. I have learned much and found many, many cousins. And I have found my surname family’s path across America from immigration through recent times. It is more engaging than a history lesson without knowing the people involved. I have seen hints at how patience could actually be a virtue, as radical as that sounds. Ha ha (that was a joke).

I shared this only to show that any effort you make in Temple & Family History or in other service to the Lord comes back to you as blessings. Even with our imperfections (me thinking I was wasting time), the Lord blesses us anyway when we engage in His work.

I testify that this is God’s work to bring all of human kind, his family, back to our Heavenly Father through the intermediacy of Jesus Christ. And that anything we can do in support of that will bring blessings.

Reminder. Current Workflow for Family History:

Think Inputs and Outputs.

  1. Historical people’s information first has to be digitized (others do this).
  2. We index people’s digitized information so the image can be associated with text, which can be found in computer searches.
  3. We link families' data together in FamilySearch.org (each member’s initial target is 4-Generations found and linked. Later we work cousin lines too.)
  4. We link people’s information (source data) to the right person to help us and others to get to know them better.
  5. Then, we can get names to take to the temple and offer them the choice of being linked to their families for eternity.
  6. By delving deeper, finding and attaching sources and their small bits of information about our ancestor’s experiences, we get to know our people, and our hearts turn to them. As more original sources are digitized and indexed, more puzzle pieces become available. It’s an ongoing and accelerating effort. When are we “done” knowing someone? We can all go beyond the dates of their birth and death and get to know our people.
  7. We can bless others by sharing with our immediate family and cousins what we’ve learned about our shared ancestors or kin, helping all of us feel more grounded, knowing where we came from. Potentially helping them to turn their hearts to their fathers too.

As Ward Temple & Family History Consultants we are called to help you with HOW to do these things, the Lord has asked that we all do.

Sincerely, Your Ward Temple & Family History Consultants,

During Stake Family Search Center posted hours, our staffing assignments are posted

(our contact info is in the tools app, or see us in church)