Family History Matters. How Family Search is helping find connections.

FamilySearch International, the genealogical arm of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), is dedicated to helping people preserve their family history. LDS supports 6580 FamilySearch centers worldwide and a database with over 19 billion searchable names.

“It’s valuable to know who you are and where you came from – good people bad people, they are your people,” says Lynne Perry, a FamilySearch Service Missionary. “You’ve got two parents, 4 grandparents, 8 greats…how quickly the numbers grow!” 

Lynne is on a mission to “grow the tree,” which means adding new names, reviewing social security death records and making sure that every person who was on the 1920 census is in the family tree. 

She has been working with the database for over 20 years and oversees the FamilySearch Center at 1702 Ensign St. in Globe. It is open to the public Tuesday and Friday mornings 9-12 and Tues, Wednesday Thursday evenings from 6-8 pm, with volunteers on hand to help the public search for information about their family. 

“Anyone in the world can join the search and it’s free to them,” says Elaine Lewis, a Globe native and FamilySearch volunteer.

Story and Voice in a Family Tree

“Genealogy is about the facts – births, deaths,” says Lynne. “I want to find the “dash” — the life stories,” says Lynne.

Her personal history is rich and her research into family history is rewarding. Lynne’s 8th great-grandfather is William Bradford, of the English Puritan Separatists, commonly known as the Pilgrims. He was Governor of Plymouth Colony and a signer of the Mayflower Compact.

On her mother’s side, her great-grandfather is Ebenezer Bryce. He was a shipbuilding apprentice when he left home in Scotland at age 17. He founded Bryce Canyon and the church in Pine Valley – the oldest Mormon chapel continuously in use.

“He was the only one with a construction ability,” says Lynne, “so he built a ship and turned it upside down to create the rafters of the church.”

Her family research has resulted in five generations of photos, newspaper stories about her grandmother’s death in a train-car wreck, and an oral interview of her great-grandmother, Hannah Jane Oliver, recorded in 1970. 

Lynne was left in the room with a tape player and a box of Kleenex. She listened to tales of adventure and disaster, and a bridge in the White Mountains, beneath which Hannah hid and heard the cavalry crossing.

“Brings them alive for me,” says Lynne. “I cried and I laughed.”

Technology and Know-how

The Genealogical Society of Utah (GSU) was founded in 1894 to help church members identify ancestors. In 1938, they began microfilming human records from around the world.

“I’ve always been interested in family history,” says Lynne Perry, “and family history has always been important to the Church.”

In 1963, they built the Granite Mountain Records Vault in Utah, a storage facility built 600 feet into a block of granite in Little Cottonwood Canyon, just north of Salt Lake City.

“It has the right temperature, humidity and it’s just a big tunnel vault in the side of the mountains,” says Lynne. “Rows and rows of microfilm and paper records.”

FamilySearch evolved from this effort and launched its public website in May, 1999. FamilySearch.org, a free online resource, is available to anyone interested in public records or their family tree. 

More than 30 languages are supported. Languages added in the past year include Arabic, Farsi, Swahili, Georgian, Guarani (a language spoken by a South American Indian group that lives primarily in Paraguay) and Greek. 

Family trees can be viewed in landscape, portrait or fan chart, with color-coding by birth place, family line, sources, stories, photos, research help, and data problems (eg. mother born after the child.) 

Individuals can upload personal stories, photos and voice recordings. A billion digital images were added last year for a total of 5.6 billion. The collection is the result of  agreements with libraries, churches, and archives from more than 100 countries.

In 2005, FamilySearch volunteers began indexing the documents. This enhanced the efficiency of the search exponentially. In 2013 they switched from microfilm to digital and in 2013, entered into a long-term strategic agreement with Ancestry.com to share records online.  

In 2017, two FamilySearch missionaries digitized all the Silver Belt newspapers and stored them in Granite Mountain. Two years later, Wigwam yearbooks (through 2015) were added. 

The explosive growth of content and users can cause mistakes. Duplicate entries, unsourced information, even “premature” deaths, as Elaine Lewis discovered when she went to enter her uncle’s passing last year. Patronymic and patriarchal naming, common in many cultures, can challenge search. Elaine’s family has a lot of common names, like Davis and Lewis.

“Everyone of them is Thomas Lewis,” she says, “You have to look at what parish they came from.”

Real People of Gila County

Elaine, along with a younger sister, followed her mother’s footsteps into genealogy and has been in and out of Family Search for 46 years. Mostly in. She volunteers every Friday 10-12 at the Family History Center. She often comes in a little early, to work on her own stuff. She has explored rundown rural cemeteries, met people with stories about her ancestors, and discovered an unknown branch of the family in a letter that fell out of a family bible.

Elaine was born in a rental on East Street and ended up on Skyline. Her mother’s uncle got her father a job at the mines and they came to Globe by bus from Clovis, New Mexico, right after WWII. Employees were bussed to the mine at the time. She remembers the family picnic they held at the mill.

Ownership of Inspiration mine changed hands five times in 42 years, but her brother, husband, father-in-law, two sons and one grandkid all worked at the same place. To record this rich vein of their family history, she created storybooks about working in an open pit mine, and one about the smelter, to tell her great grandkids what their great granddad did.

Elaine also recorded her father’s voice and can pull up 5-minute segments of him talking about his cars, about how he and her mom got married. (They got 13 tablecloths as wedding gifts!) 

In addition to her service at FamilySearch Center, Elaine volunteers at the Gila County Historical Museum at 1330 N Broad St, Globe. She got involved four years ago when Lynne Perry needed help clipping obituaries from local papers (1898 – 2025) and putting them in notebooks, available to the public. Many people, she says, come to the Gila County Historical Museum to find out about their families.

“They get information about when people died, where they are buried and where they lived, from old city directories,”  says Elaine. 

They can also learn about local ancestors by searching old Silver Belt editions.

“Up until a month ago, you would need to read the newspapers to find the information,“  says Lynne.

Today, with an experimental AI feature, you can find someone easily if a Silver Belt newspaper article mentions their name. A birth announcement, Eagle Scout award, a mission to  Montana. Maybe something more to learn about the story.

“The 1920s gave a lot of detail about things,” says Elaine. “A lot more than they do today.”