My Family 15 in 15

Over the last few months, I've had a great time working on a family history project in our Area. Of course, I've had my normal assignments with the Area Presidency, but it's always fun to do something extra as well. It started in October 2014 when Mike Higgins, our Area Family History advisor gave our Area Presidency his normal update on FH work in the Area. Elder Pearson made the comment that we should do better and we should see if we could motivate our priesthood leaders to lead the way on family history work.

Of course, that just got me thinking and about a week later I gave them a presentation on what could be done. How we would concentrate on just the 15 names in a person's genealogy (not the full 4 generations, which includes the children of each of the parents in your ancestry). So, this would be just for: you, your parents, your 4 grandparents and your 8 great grandparents. We had heard that in 2014 the "My Family" booklet had been well received, but many people were not entering the data into familysearch (which needs to happen in order to get the temple work done), so that needed to be addressed as well. In actuality, I felt this first presentation to the Area Presidency wasn't very well received. I had modeled it after a program I had done in a previous ward. I then went back to the drawing board and simplified it quite a bit, updated my powerpoint and made it a lot more straightforward. And, for the next presentation, which I made it in the middle of the day instead of the very last item on the agenda (you can get pretty tired at the end of a 10 hour meeting!) ... it was very well received. Elder Pearson had the idea of calling it, "My Family 15 in 15", since we'd want everyone to get their 15 names done in 2015. Of course, we all immediately loved the name and we talked about it several times in Area Presidency meetings throughout November and December.

The next critical point was that we added "My Famly 15 in 15" to our 2015 Area Plan and our 2015 Area Goals/Training Priorities which were finalized in December.

We have six expectations in each category and the "My Family 15 in 15" goal is #1 item in the Temple and Family History Work category.

For the November Area Council meeting, Sister B and I made the pedigree charts for 204 of our Area leaders (Area Presidency, Area Seventies, Mission Presidents, Temple Presidents, and Stake Presidents). We provided a powerpoint to all 11 Area Seventies so they could then present the program in their Area Council meetings (which is attended by the Mission, Temple, and Stake Presidents). This would lay the groundwork for the program being rolled out to 165 Stake and District Councils.

With the help of our Area FH advisors in New Zealand and Australia we put together training packets that included instructions, sample emails, tracking sheets, and a powerpoint. We then rolled out the program to the stakes. We've now delivered this to 88% of the stakes in New Zealand and Australia and we've done pedigree charts for over 1,500 stake council members. We are now starting to bring the program to ward councils, and from there to the wards.

As you can see above, our goal is simple and there are just two items everyone should do:
  1) enter your 15 family names into familysearch.org
  2) and then perform their temple ordinances in 2015

This then lead to Elder Haleck talking about "My Family 15 in 15" in our 2015 Area Broadcast that was done in February:



I did a Facebook group page for "My Family 15 in 15" and this has been a great success as well. We have over 3,500 in the group and it has been so fun seeing people include a picture of themselves with their pedigree charts. Here's the link to the group:  My Family 15 in 15 Facebook Group.  Feel free to join!

We did a contest in the office as well (which was Elder Pearson's idea) and that was fun too. I had the idea of posting the pictures on the wall of our meeting room and I feel that added to the excitement. Here's a video of the pictures:



This has been a tremendous project and we've heard some wonder stories of members finding family names, processing their work and then going to the temple.

We also get stats from Salt Lake and here is our March report:

We started in January and our trend looks positive. We just need to keep it up!!! 

Another statistic we receive from Salt Lake is how many of the 15 names have been entered into familysearch.org. They give us just an overall number, so we then asked how many have 100% of the 15 names. You have to have all 15 names entered to be counted as being done (which is the first half of the "My Family 15 in 15" goal).  On January 1, this was about 15% of the area.  At the end of March 2015, it was 19%, which equals an increase of about 25,000 members in just 3 months.  So, that was great news as well.