The Ipoh Family History Centre of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints recently organised a Family Discovery Day at its premises in Greentown on Saturday from 6.00 pm – 9.00 pm. About 50 people attended the event which was held to encourage the members of the church and friends in the community to find their own family names and to enable them to teach their family members how to do the same. The event offered family history assistance and training to members of the community.
The keynote speaker was Mr. Steve G. Stevens, who is FamilySearch’s Multi-Country Family History Manager for Southeast Asia. FamilySearch is the world’s largest and most widely-used all-free genealogy website, with more than 10 billion global, name-searchable records. Mr. Stevens has presented in various international conferences, including Rootstech, which is the world’s largest genealogy and family history conference, hosted annually in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, but also available online, in which attendees of all ages learn to discover and share their family connections and stories.
The topic of Mr Steven’s presentation was “Using Cemetery Information to Assist Family History Work.” His presentation included using the BillionGraves app, which is the world’s largest resource for GPS-tagged headstone and burial records on the web, with over 12 million headstone records, with more being added daily. Mr. Stevens explained how we can help people discover information about their ancestors by taking pictures of headstones in local and other cemeteries and by transcribing the information found on the images so that it becomes searchable.
In addition to the BillionGraves presentation, various groups of the church unit displayed their family trees and the stories of their ancestors. No matter how you choose to gather the information, you’ll end up having a deeper appreciation for who you are and where you come from when you know your roots.
by Loh Gek Lian
