Some years ago I met a Hopi woman at her home high atop a desert plateau. She was a potter, who made clay vessels in their old traditional way. I asked about the designs on her pots, and what they meant. Some of them she described – for example, one was rain falling on the mesa and another was the sun shining on the desert. But the rest she didn’t know! How can that be? She explained that she would walk around the village looking through the dust for old broken pieces of pottery. Some had designs and she would include them on her works.

It’s terribly sad that so many of her ancestors left no names and stories behind. Still, I admired the lovely way that she found a connection with these nameless ancestors.

Experiences like this help me remember that there is no one right way to connect with our ancestors, to “turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to the fathers.” As a family history consultant, I have tried to get my fellow Saints interested in the great search, but many of my fellow Saints have expressed discouragement at how vast and intimidating the search seems to be. This is especially true for those whose family tree has already been meticulously built by relatives and ancestors. A beginner in the field of genealogy is like a three-year-old child who is late to the Easter Egg hunt – how rewarding will that search be?

No wonder people get discouraged. It is certainly not rewarding if the only goal of family history is new names for the temple. But, as important as that is, we have been taught that there are lots of ways to Turn the Hearts.

For instance:

– My grandfather fought in the war and was trained in the use of a .50 cal. machine gun. If I somehow got my hands on one and shot a few rounds with it at a gun range, would I be doing family history? Who would say that I wasn’t?

– If I take my children to ancestor graves on Memorial Day and tell stories from my childhood, am I doing family history?

– I have a cookbook from ancestors in Montana that is over a hundred years old. I read through it once and found a very adventuresome recipe that begins, “take and skin three or four good-size squirrels.” If I were to cook up a big pot of squirrel soup would I be doing family history? Why not?

– When Alma admonished his son, “I would that ye should do as I have done, in remembering the captivity of our fathers,” were they doing family history? Sure!

In the end, all we really need is our imagination and a few facts to guide us.

The work is multi-faceted, and there are so many ways to remember and connect! I believe that every one of us, each and every Latter-day Saint, has the interests and abilities to make a unique contribution to their own family tree. I am grateful for the existence of familysearch.org, that gives us a place to share the things we have found about our ancestors, and also learn what others have found. And I am grateful for the Atonement which means that the dead are not gone and still matter.

– Garrett Pace, Consultant, Granite Family History Center