DesignZ by DeDe

Live Life * Tell the Story

You are here: Home / Archives for names

names

Family Tree TuesdayZ | BYU Family History Technology Apps

My daughter has been getting into family history lately and that excites me because that is about the age that I began being interested too. She’s started a project of collecting family stories and I think its going to be great fun to collaborate together and discover more about our genealogy! In this newly-found quest, my daughter found out about a local Family History Fair a few weeks ago and so we went and had a great time learning through some classes. One of the classes that I attended talked about some great family history apps from BYU, that make family history come alive for families! I’m so excited to share these with you today and I hope you will try them out with your families!

The Family History Technology Lab, sponsored by the Department of Computer Science at Brigham Young University, is the gateway to a variety of Family History Web Apps that are free and open to the public and used by hundreds of thousands of people around the world to help them with their family history. To use these apps you will need a username and password from **FamilySearch.org, (so you will need to signup and bring in your genealogy through the site) and then you can dig right in! 

    • RelativeFinder | an app developed by BYU professors and students that connects individuals with famous historical figures, as well as friends and neighbors. It works through the FamilySearch API to identify common ancestors and show how two people are related. It also allows you to create your own groups so you can see how you might be related to a friend or a deceased person or even with people standing next to you by allowing RelativeFinder to use your location!

 

    • Virtual Pedigree | an app that quickly and dynamically navigates your family tree with both expandable and collapsible ancestry as well as descendancy. It uses BYU’s patented Elastic Paper technology to expand the entire tree with a simple single click and drag, whether exploring ancestors or descendants. It works especially well on tablets and smart phones by simply touching and dragging over the tree. You can view and navigate through hundreds of names, up and down the tree in a matter of seconds.

 

    • One Page Genealogy | an app that allows you to construct large pedigree charts with user-defined color and other attributes. It can create a custom tree, allowing 14-16 generations to be placed on a 2-3 foot wide format, something that is not possible with standard tree-charting applications. You can make charts from a tree in FamilySearch or from a Gedcom file.

 

    • Pedigree Pie | an app that provides a graphical pie-shaped representation of ancestors based on countries of origin and allows a user to quickly see what percent English, German, Swedish, etc, they are.

 

    • Descendancy Explorer | an app that members of the LDS church can use to quickly and easily find names of their ancestors that are ready to take to the temple.

 

    • Geneopardy | a game app that is based on the well-known game of Jeopardy. It is great for family gatherings and a fun way for children and adults to get to know their ancestors better!

 

    • Wheel of Family Fortune | a game app that is based on the well-known game of Wheel of Fortune, but with hints and names drawn from your own family tree. A great way to engage family members, old and young, in family history!

 

    • And more to come! So check back to see what other apps are being developed!

 

Aren’t these so much fun! I’m so excited to explore these apps and get my family excited about learning about where they came from and why they are, who they are! So try them out and come back and tell me what you think!

 

** I am a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS or Mormon), which has created FamilySearch. But even if you aren’t a member of my church, please check it out – it is an amazing site that helps families connect with all generations!

 

 

Tuesdays

Family History TuesdayZ | Names

Journal Prompt: Why were you given your name? Were you named after someone else?Journal Prompt: Why were you given your name? Were you named after someone else?

My Journaling:
My parents saw my name DeeDee Lynn in a magazine from a ballerina and they liked it, so they went ahead and named me DeDe Lin, of course spelling it differently!

Family History TuesdayZEach Tuesday, I am going to be offering prompts or ideas. If you don’t write in your journal regularly – I am going to encourage you to write just ONCE A WEEK and answer the question/idea that I give on Tuesdays. These ideas hopefully will spark a memory and you will be able to capture that in what you write/record so that it can be left for your children/grandchildren/family/friends. Give as much detail as you can when answering.

Will you do this for me? Will you do this for your families? You can write it down in a journal, you can type it up on a computer or journaling software, you can take a recorder and talk, you can videotape your answers, you can even scrap a page with the journaling. It doesn’t matter how you do this – it’s just important that you do it. The memories, the dates, the information is the only real thing we can leave to our families when we are gone.

Family History TuesdayZ | Children Names

Journal prompt: If you have children, were your children named after someone?Journal prompt: If you have children, were your children named after someone?

My Journaling:
Joey and I have always felt it was important to give our kids names that we liked, but also that meant something to us.

Joseph Clark Smith Jr
JJ obviously is named after his dad and being members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints – we also wanted to name him after the Prophet Joseph Smith. JJ’s middle name is named after Joey’s childhood best friend.

Elizabeth Colleen Smith
We both loved the name Elizabeth and from the get-go knew we would shorten it to Beth. Her middle name is after my Grandma, who was very special to me – she died when I was a junior in high school, but I have so much in common with her.

 

Family History TuesdayZEach Tuesday, I am going to be offering prompts or ideas. If you don’t write in your journal regularly – I am going to encourage you to write just ONCE A WEEK and answer the question/idea that I give on Tuesdays. These ideas hopefully will spark a memory and you will be able to capture that in what you write/record so that it can be left for your children/grandchildren/family/friends. Give as much detail as you can when answering.

Will you do this for me? Will you do this for your families? You can write it down in a journal, you can type it up on a computer or journaling software, you can take a recorder and talk, you can videotape your answers, you can even scrap a page with the journaling. It doesn’t matter how you do this – it’s just important that you do it. The memories, the dates, the information is the only real thing we can leave to our families when we are gone.

Family History TuesdayZ | Names

I have been attending a Family History class during Sunday School on Sundays and this past Sunday as I was listening to the lesson, something really sparked in my heart and I decided that I wanted to bring some Family History ideas to my blog.

Ever since I was a teenager, genealogy and family stories have really interested me. I spent a lot of time working on my own family history and collecting stories of my ancestors as part of a Young Women project when I was about 16. Since then, life got in the way and I haven’t spent the time that I have wanted to, in collecting the memories and the genealogy.

Lately, I’ve really had all this on my mind and I feel like I need to start working on collecting the stories – especially from my immediate family. I would love to create a scrapbook and collect all the documents/stories/dates and everything. But as I think about all that I want to do, I start getting a bit overwhelmed by how enormous this project is and have been wondering how to get started. But in Sunday’s lesson, I realized that one of the most important things to do right now – is my OWN personal history. I haven’t been keeping my own journal and that is something that I truly want to capture for my children and my children’s children.

So I hope that my mom and dad are reading this – I hope that Joey’s parents are reading this- I hope my other family is reading this and they will take this to heart and help me with this project. As much as I would like to interview them all and get the information and stories from them – it isn’t always easy in this time in my life with being a mom and being away from most of my family.

So I hope you will all enjoy this and participate! Let me know what you think!

 

Journal Prompt: What is your full name? Who were you named for? How did you get your name? How do you feel about your name?Journal Prompt: What is your full name? Who were you named for? How did you get your name? How do you feel about your name?

 

Family History TuesdayZEach Tuesday, I am going to be offering prompts or ideas. If you don’t write in your journal regularly – I am going to encourage you to write just ONCE A WEEK and answer the question/idea that I give on Tuesdays. These ideas hopefully will spark a memory and you will be able to capture that in what you write/record so that it can be left for your children/grandchildren/family/friends. Give as much detail as you can when answering.

Will you do this for me? Will you do this for your families? You can write it down in a journal, you can type it up on a computer or journaling software, you can take a recorder and talk, you can videotape your answers, you can even scrap a page with the journaling. It doesn’t matter how you do this – it’s just important that you do it. The memories, the dates, the information is the only real thing we can leave to our families when we are gone.