Today, during Stake Conference, one of my amazing Beehive girls spoke about Family History. Let me just say that she did an amazing job and everyone was inspired by her words. I loved it so much that I asked her if she wouldn't mind sharing her talk with me so that I could post parts of it here. She had some great insights on how to help us achieve the 1st Quarter Goal from our "Take the Quarter Challenge." Here's what she said…
"Putting pictures and memories onto family history is really easy and really important. Wouldn't you like to know where you got your brown-eyes from in your blue-eyed family? Or where the genes that made you shorter than your siblings are from? Don't you wish that you could go online and look through pictures of the people that passed those genes through their family straight down to you? You can help your children and your grandchildren see what your parents looked like just by uploading a photo. If you think that's too much work then here are some startling statistics that might show you how easy it really is to upload photos. On average 40 million photos are uploaded to instagram daily. 350 million photos are uploaded to facebook daily, and snapchat users collectively receive 400 million snaps a day. If we took just one third of just those three social media sites and instead of uploading to instagram and facebook and snapping, uploaded to familysearch.org then we would have about 14 pictures of every single living person on this earth after just one year. Imagine how much of an impact that could have on the future generations! That's more than a picture a month, of everybody. No would would go forgotten and our decendants would know exactly what we looked like our entire lives if we continued this trend. Now I know that most adults may not have an instagram or a snapchat, but plenty of you have facebook that if you switched over to familysearch.org you would most definitely make a difference. "
In closing she said…
"The final step to finding your ancestors is to make time for them. In our world today we are always finding that there are more important things to do more important places to be, that the things that should truly be the most important are being bypassed. If you can make time to watch an episode of your favorite TV series, then you can definitely take those 30-40 minutes to index. I'm not saying that you should stop doing anything that isn't family history and get to work finding those names, but I am asking that, no, I am challenging you to take at least an hour or two to sit down and index, to upload a photo a week at least, and to write down just one thing that happened to you that day on familysearch.org. At times you may get frustrated with not being able to find out what letter the swirly thing on the screen represents, or you may just find yourself not wanting to do family history because you have “better things” to do. When these thoughts and feelings come to you remember this scripture from D&C 18:15 which reads “And if it so be that you should labor all your days… and bring, save it be one soul unto me, how great shall be your joy with him in the kingdom of my Father!”
