Exciting!

If you know me, you know I LOVE everything to do with personal and family history. Personal history is super easy for me to keep up but a lot of details with family history are overwhelming to me. I'm interested in it, but in the past 10 years I haven't been able to motivate myself to research my roots. Part of the problem is I want to do things as quick as I can and the older people that are into doing family history don't have quick enough answers for me... until now.

My Grandpa Park is teaching a family history class at my church and the things he is teaching us about the New Family Search program are exciting. The New Family Search program is so much better than anything I have seen before. Still, even with how cool the program is, I was feeling overwhelmed with where to start until I met a really cool guy in St. George.

Last weekend I went to a family history expo in St. George to sell the Digital Scrapbook Memories CDs. I couldn't really leave my booth so I would occasionally ask people what they were learning at the conference. One guy (A.C. Ivory) stopped to buy some CDs for his mom and we ended up talking for a while. I was so impressed with him I can't even begin to explain. He is only 22 and knows tons about genealogy. He was asked to do a five generations chart before he left on his LDS mission and became hooked on genealogy. I was so excited to talk to him because I knew he would be the perfect resource for me. Because he is so young he is tech savvy and really understands the power of the internet and all of the computer programs out there. In the past years I have been taught by people that are much older than me and they teach me so slow I can't hardly stand it. If you are interested in tracing your roots you should follow A.C.'s blog. He is so cool and definitely the one for anyone tech savvy to go to for advice on genealogy.

Also at the expo, I talked to the guy next to me who has this really cool website (treeseek.com) that allows you to link your New Family Search info with his maps. My favorite was the fan chart shown above. Although it's much too small for you to see, I hope it gives you an idea of what it is. They print beautifully at large sizes. It was incredibly easy to create this chart using his website and I love the way it looks. As a matter of fact, I love it so much I spent half of the day making, printing, picking up, mailing and delivering fan charts to all of Keith and my grandparents and parents. The fan charts are incredible because they make it so easy to see where the holes in your family history are. Because of these fan charts I know where to start doing my family history. So cool!!! If you are an LDS youth leader you should have an activity for everyone to make these charts. I think it would be a great way for the youth to be able to visually see where they come from.