Discovering Your Heritage

The Overson Family

Everyone has a heritage. I am always sad when I talk to people about their ancestors to find out how little they know. One of the most interesting and impressive ways to get through this barrier of knowledge, for anyone associated with the FamilySearch.org program, is to take some time to look at the Memories section of the website. Photography has been around for almost two hundred years and great discoveries are being made all the time. Recently, a previously unknown daguerreotype image of Wilford Woodruff, former President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was discovered online on eBay.com. The person who found the image had searched over 70,000 images over the past two years before finding this treasure.

The FamilySearch.org website is an extremely valuable place to look for previously unknown photos of your own ancestors. Although the program has not been online for very long, there are already millions of photographs available. As you look at your family members in the FamilySearch.org Family Tree, if anyone has uploaded a photo, document or story, there will be a number in the Memories link to that individual. Here is a screenshot showing the link to an ancestor's Memories:

When you click on this link, you will see whatever your relatives have added to this person's Memories. Here is a screenshot of this same person's photos:

You never know what treasures you will find. If you want to see all of the photos added by your relatives, then you click on the Memories link at the top of the page and look at the People link. Here is part of my People page:

What if you don't find any photos? Then get busy and upload some of your own. You can add .jpg, .tif, .bmp, and .png images up to 15MB is size by simply dragging the icon of the photo from your computer onto the upload section of the Memories. Here is a screenshot of the upload section:

Once you upload a photo, you can tag the people in the image and attach the photo to each person's detail page, such as was done with the image of Henry Martin Tanner above.