How Family Histories Can Build Bridges Between Generations

Latter Day Radio, now podcasting from The Intersection of Faith & Freedom.

If recent events have you worrying about the future, let’s not forget the challenges of the past. And, let’s remember the hard-scrabble lives of our ancestors who passed through them. Consider the trials, persecution, wars and illness that our forefathers experienced since the Church was organized. In a podcast we have posted here on this website, we recounted the trials that Wilford Woodruff passed through until his death in 1898; even the day before his death, he wrote in his daily journal. How precious are his words to his posterity and to us at this present time. In this podcast today, guests Mark and Kay Hancock, publisher and author respectively, share their thoughts about journal writing, memoirs and personal histories and give us some helps and hints on writing our own.

In 1999 in General Conference, Elder Dennis B. Neuenschwander of the Seventy spoke of the value of family records than can “bridge the generations:”

“Families collect furniture, books, porcelain, and other valuable things, then pass them on to their posterity. Such beautiful keepsakes remind us of loved ones now gone and turn our minds to loved ones unborn. They form a bridge between family past and family future.

“Every family has other, more valuable, keepsakes. These include genealogies, family stories, historical accounts, and traditions. These eternal keepsakes also form a bridge between past and future and bind generations together in ways that no other keepsake can.

“I would like to share a few thoughts about family history, bridges, and eternal keepsakes. Family history builds bridges between the generations of our families, builds bridges to activity in the Church, and builds bridges to the temple.”

Mark Hancock is the owner of a publishing company, Family Heritage Publishers, that specializes in publishing and binding digital, on-demand personal histories; Kay Hancock is the author of a highly successful romance novel, “Dancing on Broken Glass,” that has been published in multiple languages around the world.

Listen and be encouraged: you too can publish your own family’s story!

(The photo shown here is of my great-grandfather William Richard Wiseman and his grandson, Joe Garland, my father’s first cousin; Grandpa Wiseman walks across the Plains in 1853 at the age of four; he was born in London, England)