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Will conduct April 13 Tallahassee workshops
April 3, 2019
TALLAHASSEE –
Tom and Irene Price of Rexburg, Idaho are family history road warriors.
The senior volunteers for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, based in Atmore, Alabama, spend their time traveling the region giving presentations about family history.
They started their volunteer work in November 2015 and are currently working on their second 18-month volunteer stint. They will return to Idaho in May.
Before retirement, Price worked in computer software development and later started a passenger transportation company.
The couple have nine children and 27 grandchildren.
Traveling in their RV, they have given more than 200 presentations to more than 2,500 people across the region.
The Price’s will conduct family history workshops Saturday, April 13 at 2 p.m. and 4:30 p.m. at The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, 3717 Thomasville Road.
“Family history is all about families. When people come for help and discover information about their families, they are happy. Finding a birth, marriage or death certificate, or a newspaper article or a picture of an ancestor’s tombstone brings families closer together,” said Tom Price.
The Price’s are experts in FamilySearch, the largest genealogy organization in the world with more than four billion names researched. The free program helps families and individuals research their family trees.
“A great part of our experience comes because FamilySearch.org is unique in that it uses a ‘One World Tree.’ Often, after someone adds their first or second generation of deceased relatives to the tree, their lines will connect with research that others have previously added to the tree. They are delighted to see their line automatically fill in with generations of their ancestors,” said Irene Price.
Charles Watson, director of the Tallahassee Family History Center, located at 312 Stadium Drive, believes family history research connects the generations.
“We believe families are the foundation of our society. Researching our families is a way to link one generation to another,” he said.
The center will host a Family History Discovery Day Saturday, May 4 from 8:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Classes will help individuals and families learn how to do family history research.
Tallahassee’s family history center is one of 4,957 centers worldwide, offering free family history research assistance. FamilySearch offers image capture, digital conversion, preservation, online indexing, and online access services.
“Family history research is one of the most popular hobbies in the world. People want to know where they came from. They want to know about their ancestors,” said Watson.
Tom Price believes most people have an innate desire to search their roots.
“Most everybody we have worked with seems to have a desire to discover something new about their ancestors. People inherently have a desire to belong to something ‘bigger’ than just themselves, and connecting to ancestors and cousins does just that,” he said.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints sponsors FamilySearch. Registration on familysearch.org is free of charge.
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