Are you excited about the idea of learning more about your family history but don’t feel like you have time? Today I am beginning a new series titled 5-Minute Family History. This series will focus on ways you can connect with your ancestors and even complete real genealogical research tasks in 5-minute increments.
The platform I will be focusing on in these 5-Minute tasks will be FamilySearch. The fact that it is free to use makes it easy for everyone to participate. The articles in this series will be written with the assumption that you already have a FamilySearch account and have connected to deceased family members in the tree. If you haven’t yet completed those steps, please read the following article for help:
Getting Started With FamilySearch’s Shared Family Tree
Today’s 5-Minute Family history invitation is to open and follow through on the emails you receive from FamilySearch. This morning I received an email with the subject: “Isabelle Lyman is featured on a new page!” Isabelle is my paternal grandmother. When I opened the email, I was invited to learn more about her life story by clicking a button titled Discover Her Story! After clicking the button I was prompted to sign in to FamilySearch and was then taken to a page that featured her:
A basic timeline was shown with Isabelle’s birth, marriage, and death dates. Clicking on See Time Line allowed me to view more events about her life. One thing that I love to enable on my ancestors’ FamilySearch Time Lines is Historical Events. To do this, click Show at the top of the Time Line and select Historical Events.
Doing this allowed me to see that my grandmother was eleven when women got to vote for the first time in her home state of Wyoming in 1920. She was 20 when the stock market crashed, triggering the Great Depression, and she was 32 when the Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor.
The timeline events as well as my knowledge of additional historical events helped me realize that Isabelle also lived through the 1918 Influenza pandemic, World War I, the Korean Conflict, and the Vietnam War. She and others of her era were no strangers to disease, economic hardship, and political unrest. I knew each of my grandparents, and witnessed for myself that they built happy homes and lived abundant lives in spite of the hardships they lived through. Thinking about the similarities between Isabelle’s experiences and my own helped me feel a connection to her and gather strength to thrive in my own time of pandemic and political unrest. I was able to remember these feelings by simply taking 5 minutes to open an email, click a button, and review the events of my grandmother’s life this morning.
Next time you receive an email from FamilySearch, take the time to open it and follow through on the activity FamilySearch is sharing with you. It’s an easy way to do family history in 5 minutes.
Notes:
If you are not receiving these types of emails from FamilySearch, you can request them by signing in to FamilySearch.org > Click on Your Name > Settings > Notifications. Make sure the boxes for FamilySearch Information and Discoveries About My Ancestors are checked. To enable these settings in the Family Tree app, go to More (iOS) or Menu (Android) > Settings > Subscriptions.
If you didn’t receive an email like mine about a woman in your family, but would still like to connect with your ancestors in this way, visit FamilySearch’s page: Celebrate the Women in your Family Tree.
