Geoffrey Parkerson - Genealogy

Posted by Tom Breen

on Dec 04, 2013

At today’s meeting, we were introduced to a gentleman whose job it is to help families discover their history. Richard and Wynette Searle introduced us to Geoffrey Parkerson, director of the Family History Center in Palmyra. Family History Centers (FHC) are units of the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, operated by the LDS Church.

Genealogy is an important matter to members of the LDS church. The church began its efforts to preserve genealogical records in 1894 with the founding of the Salt Lake Genealogical Library. At first, the collection consisted of books. In 1938, they began microfilming the records. In 1960 construction began on the Granite Mountain Records Vault in the mountains near Salt Lake City. Completed in 1965, the vault contains over 3.5 billion images stored on microfilm, microfiche, and digital media.

There are over 2.4 million rolls of microfilm stored there, and FamilySearch is working to digitize all of them. This will make the images available all over the world via the internet or at Family History Centers. In some cases, the images stored there are the only copy in existence.

After sharing a YouTube video which showed a behind-the-scenes look at the Granite Mountain facility, Mr. Parkerson opened a link to familysearch.org and showed us a fan chart of his family. He mentioned that there are many resources available for people to use in researching their family tree, including familytree.com and ancestry.com. Also, he mentioned that he was able to go to findagrave.com and submit a request which resulted in someone e-mailing him a picture of the gravestone of one of his ancestors. Our own Jim Bush has taken photos for that website.

At the conclusion of the program, Mr Parkerson and the Searles presented president Pam with some genealogical research they had done on her family.

If you have an interest in researching your family’s history, the Palmyra Family History Center is located at 2801 Temple Road and is open to the public from 9am – noon and 7 – 9 pm Tuesdays and Thursdays, and 9am – noon on Saturdays.

Richard Searle displays a ship's manifest on which one of Pam's relatives is listed as a passenger.