“Family History Changes Hearts,” Ensign, May 2013, 137
Family History Changes Hearts
Many family history centers of the future will be in the home, predicted Elder Bradley D. Foster of the Seventy in an address given on March 23 in conjunction with the RootsTech 2013 Family History and Technology Conference in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA.
Elder Foster, an Assistant Executive Director of the Family History Departments, said that there will soon be nine billion people on the earth and that the Lord has prepared technology that will make it possible to “bind and connect all those families together.”
He emphasized the importance of doing family history, learning the stories of our ancestors—not just genealogy, finding names and dates. The gravestones of any cemetery in the world contain a name, birth date, a dash, and then a death date, he said. “That little dash between the birth and death date seems so small and insignificant, but our whole history lies within it,” he remarked. “So while we often focus on discovering those dates, our love of our ancestors—the turning of our hearts to our fathers—comes forth from discovering the dash.”
Family history brings us together as we share stories and work together, he explained. “Therefore, genealogy changes our charts; family history changes our hearts.”