TWIN FALLS • Family trees branch off in interesting ways and are quite revealing. With the Internet and a little free time, turning into a family history sleuth is pretty easy.
But that starts with ground work put in by folks like those at the Twin Falls Family History Center, where volunteers from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint have digitized all kinds of local records — births, obituaries, marriages, divorces — and added them to familysearch.org" href="http://www.familysearch.org" target="_blank">familysearch.org
On this website, you can create or find existing profiles of your family members and make your own family tree. With each entry, you can add those documents and upload photos to design the stories of your kinfolk.
The website itself is a service provided by the Mormon Church. Volunteers from its churches and missionaries all over help index records for people. Why the Mormon interest in genealogy? Visit the church’s website (http://bit.ly/1WI13EI) and you’ll find this interest comes from a desire to baptize relatives who have died.
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“...we are driven by our doctrine that teaches that marriage and families can continue beyond this life,” the website says. “But this can only happen when families are sealed together in one of the Lord’s holy temples around the world and united for all eternity.”
On Saturday, I met with Annette Tucker, a consultant at the Family History Center. I’m not religious, nor am I interested in baptizing my late Quitugua and Hernandez brothers and sisters. I’m simply curious and was hoping to dig a little dirt. Tucker was kind of enough to show me how to search for the records I was looking for.
“If you can find an obit, a lot of times you can put together a tree,” she said.
That’s because records like obituaries list other family members. From there, you can piece together your blood line. My searches, however, were on the living.
In separate searches, I entered my parents’ names and where they were living when they were married, Fort Worth, Texas. Immediately their marriage information popped up, showing their age, where they married and when.
He was 21 and she was 19. It was April 4, 1983, the day the doomed Challenger Space Shuttle launched its first of ten missions. Another search revealed their divorce, March 23, 1992 in Okaloosa County, Fla., where I was born in 1988.
I also found information on my dad’s marriage to my first stepmom, who was 26 at the time. They married in Bexar County, Texas, on April 22, 1995, one year after Richard Nixon died. Less than two years later, my sister was born.
My quick Saturday foray into genealogy was interesting in that it showed just how free I am. I’m 27 but by this age my parents had me. When my first stepmother was in her late 20’s, she had my kid sister. It’s a typical age group to start families, but I’m not looking to add to the family tree anytime soon and familysearch.org helped me remember that.
