The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and Genealogy

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) and the Mormon Church trace their family trees to find the names of ancestors who died without learning about the restored Mormon Gospel so that these relatives from past generations can be baptized by proxy in the temple. For them, Genealogy is a way to save more souls and strengthen the eternal family unit. In the process of gathering genealogical data, the church has been the forerunner as remains the current leader in the compilation of family history information (source: https://www.pbs.org/mormons/etc/genealogy.html).

Ancestry began as an American focused genealogy publishing company in 1983 selling The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints publications. While not associated with the LDS church today, according to their website, Ancestry hosts the world’s largest online collection of family history records. More than 20 billion records. Their members have created 100 million family trees containing more than 13 billion records. In 2006 the company added a Canadian and UK based version of the site to accommodate more focused research in each geographic area and continues to expand on this front. They have additional brands like Fold3, Newspapers.com, and Ancestry DNA. 

As a result of this religious dedication to family history, professional genealogists and casual family tree hobbyists reap the benefit. I have been a paying member of Ancestry since 2006 when they expanded the platform to include the Canadian version. In order to share family trees on Ancestry the owner of the tree has to send invites via email. If you are interested in this, please contact me via email and I would be happy to send one along. My tree is not private (except for living relations) and is available for anyone browsing or researching on Ancestry.

For those unfamiliar with Ancestry, to view any records or trees you must create your own membership. Once a membership is chosen and an account set up you can utilize the two-week trial to decide if you want to continue with the membership payments. If you have previously utilized the free trial try to set up another free trial using a different computer with a fresh email. During the free trial, you will have access to my tree and any other Ancestry records that you have signed up for (Canada or World). I would expect that most information for those with casual interest the family tree would be obtainable in the two-week window. You must remember to cancel your membership before the two-week window ends or you will be charged the full membership price you chose. Once you have access to the records you can save them to your local computer as digital files or print them as needed. 

If you are interested in furthering your own tree research on Ancestry you must start your own family tree and pay for a membership. Ancestry's platform is very intuitive and once you begin most North American and European ancestors with records between 1850 to 1920 are generally very easily attainable.  Ancestry's hints are a trademark aspect of their business but need to be carefully reviewed to ensure you have the correct ancestor. Once you have confirmed the validity of the hints you can accept and add the information to your tree, you can even accept an entire tree (such as mine) but this is not always the best course of action since you can't vet every possible family member and associated document for accuracy.

In a future post, I will be doing a Top 10 list of things I have learned about Ancestry that are not immediately obvious to new users.

Background

Recently at a family funeral, I received a number of requests to share my genealogy research. I have amassed an incredible amount of information, documents, and photos and so for those who would like to know more, I will attempt to share some of it here.

I have been researching family history on and off for over 25 years. I have a certificate in Genealogy from the National Institute of Genealogical Studies, from the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto.

I use Ancestry and My Heritage online websites to document my findings. I have been a paying Ancestry member since 2006 and the majority of my research is housed there. I will share the link to Ancestry in my next post and explain the associated limitations if you are not a member.

Surnames

My research includes both paternal and maternal sides of my family tree as well as my husbands side. Each generation of your grandparents will double and you very quickly get to 16 surnames. Here are just a few of the surnames I am researching:

Paternal:           Maternal:

Anderson          Thompson

Marley               Parent

Sargent             LePage

Lane                  Savoie

Snowden           Gallant

Middlestorb       many more...             

Countries

The paternal surnames come from England and all immigrated to Canada starting in about 1860 to the beginning of the twentieth century. My maternal surnames are principally from France and Ireland and arrived here as early at the 1660's. 

Privacy

I will not post any personal information regarding relatives who are living for privacy reasons. Any documents or information posted are part of the public record and available to anyone though disclosure requests at the related institution in the associated country or online in digital format at various record offices or family tree websites.

Contact

I can be reached via email at oakleavesfamilytree@gmail.com please feel free to contact me for any questions you may have.

You may also like to choose to register your email with me so that you will receive a notification when I post something new. This is available on the upper right side of the page.