An Explosion of Memories

I am still encountering a significant number of people, even members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who have yet to even view their Memories section on FamilySearch.org. I recently went to my own Memories section and counted the number of people with memories added. There are approximately 425+ individuals when I view "All" in the People section of Memories with thousands of uploaded files.

Now, before going on, I need to mention that detailed instructions for gathering, preserving and adding photos, documents, stories and audio files to the Memories section of FamilySearch.org are available on The Family History Guide Project #2 for Memories. The Family History Guide is a free, sequenced and structured educational tool now linked directly from LDS.org as the instructional choice.

I have found one of the fastest and most effective ways to get people engaged in family history is to show them their own Memories section. If by chance, the person has no family members that have uploaded photos, documents, stories or audio files, then you can show them what could happen if they become involved in the FamilySearch.org program by showing them a few of your own uploaded files or those uploaded by your own family.

We have been using the Memories section recently for serious research while helping patrons at the BYU Family History Library and friends to try and solve some family mysteries. I am encouraging everyone to upload their scanned photos and more importantly their documents to the Memories section and then they do not have to bring paper copies with them when we begin doing some research into their families. With the documents attached and tagged to each person in the Family Tree, we can refer to the documents instantly and not have to dig through piles or old notebooks.

What is amazing is the number of Memories that are being accumulated on FamilySearch.org. According to statistics published by FamilySearch, there have been 14.89 million photos uploaded as of the date of this post. There are also an additional 1.1 million stories and over 703 million sources added to the Family Tree.