FHL Discovery Center

The Family History Library has created a great new experience for families and youth. Previously when you walked into the library you would have noticed a closed off and stuffy library. This is no longer the experience you will have. When you walk into the library now, you will see many large t.v. screens and people having fun learning about their families.

Some of the activities you can participate in are:

1. Relative finder
2. Learn all about me
3. Find out where you come from
4. Picture your story
5. Record a story

This weekend while at the Saturday, Family Discovery Day, I got my family to attend. While we were at the conference, I took them to the library to try out this experience. We had so much fun. Let me share a few experiences we had to give you an idea how much fun this experience is.

My mom was looking at relative finder, and a man came up to her and said, "Hi, cousin." We went to his screen and found out how we were connected. We then got into a conversation, getting to know each other. My cousin came from California to meet me. It was awesome!

I took my sister over to the getting to know you screens, and we had fun sharing what happened to each of us during the year we were born. For me - cd's outsold vinyls for the first time - Wow we don't even really use these any more. We looked at the price of gas during each of our birth years and the price of stamps - can we say inflation?

At the immigration station, you not only get to see where your ancestors came from, but they have some reasons as to why people left certain areas of the world. Reasons could be famine, or religious persecution, etc. Another thing here, we could see historical pictures of different places your ancestor lived. Wow!

We took pictures together as a family, we were able to pick out the background and then stand in front of the green screen. We also took individual pictures where we put our face into a certain picture. There were so many to pick from, we had fun laughing together at what we looked like.

Last, we got the family together for an interview. They had questions that brought on some thinking, and laughing. At first, they thought it was very uncomfortable, but by the end of the 10 minutes we were relaxed and having fun.

All in all, this experience was incredible. It really is something you should try out with your family, youth groups and YSA groups. It will bring a lot of laughter, and many moments of WOW! Come in and understand why family history is so awesome. You do need to schedule a time to have this experience. For information about scheduling check out this website: https://familysearch.org/discovery/ 
You too can have some of these great experiences so come in and enjoy!