I thoroughly enjoyed a long conversation with my Sweetheart this morning. Since the late shift has remained in my schedule, we do not have much time to talk in the evening, but talking twice is a great compensation!
I felt that this morning I should do some work in German indexing, but then I had the thought that I ought to work on cleaning up the records in FamilySearch, instead. That had to be inspiration, because I came across one, and then half a dozen records with duplicates that had not been there before, but had been added in the last month! I messaged the person who added these duplicates, and I surely hope that the issue can be resolved easily, and that no more duplicates will be entered.
I found a passage in the book of Mormon in The Book of Mormon that I had never applied to myself before, but which struck me in particular this morning after deciphering records yesterday. Although Mormon 8:16 is speaking of the blessing on Joseph Smith for bringing The Book of Mormon to light, I think that any one who is involved in family history work, even just in preserving or sharing family stories, will be blessed for bringing these things to light. I know that I have certainly been blessed over many decades as I have been involved in this work.
My time as a helper at the Library was quite limited today, but I had fun experience with a guest who was born in Germany in 1930. He has been able to gather a lot of information, and brought along a case in which were many documents and pictures. I was not able to help him find any additional information to take his lines back farther, as there simply were no more records available. What I was able to do is to take pictures of some of his family pictures, and of a document to attach to his tree [an iPad is a very handy family history tool--thank you, dear daughter!]. I also encouraged him to enlist the help of a child or grandchild to get all of his documents and pictures attached to Family Tree so that they will be preserved.
During the time I spent helping him, he told about different instances in his life, but admitted that he had not written his life story. I wrote out instructions for using the Family Tree app on a smartphone or other device to record audio so that his stories can be preserved of his family. As he said, there is no one older that he can go to for information--he is the last repository of the family stories.
I had a nice long break for choir and for a meal in the late afternoon. When I went back to the Library there were few guests and no one needed my help, so I worked on a project that I was assigned to during the Trainers meeting on Monday--going through the Swedish Case Study. While earlier I had identified what I thought were problems in the case study, in going through the procedures tonight I figured out that I was simply taking a different path to the information on the Family Search website.
A bit further along in the case study the instructions were to go to ArkivDigital for the rest of the study. I did go to that site, but got frustrated with trying to find the appropriate records. Then I noticed that FamilySearch had the records I was looking for. Since I did not understand why I should use the other site, I decided to ask someone with Swedish experience--and the only person available tonight was a young elder. The young elder showed me how to work with the ArkivDigital site, and to a certain extent it was easier--once someone showed me how to work with it.
A more important part of talking with the young elder was learning of some of his frustrations with the case studies, and learning some additional items that we could offer in-service training on. Earlier in the day when I talked with other trainers about my finding the discrepancies in the case study I used some terms they were not familiar with concerning how the images are divided up, or way-pointed, on FamilySearch--so they suggested I should develop a presentation on that concept. I had learned about that during my internet mission several years ago, and I think it will be a very good thing to share.
Well, I am up way too late--my phone has gone into sleep mode--and it is a very good thing that tomorrow is my P day!!!!
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