Spotlight: Lily Parker

Lily Parker

Lily Parker, of Spanish Fork, Utah, was 6 or 7 years old when she first became interested in family history. Her first Family Discovery Day at RootsTech was amazing and she loved the prototype Family Discovery Center at the Joseph Smith Memorial Building.

Now at the age of 11 years old she is RootsTech's youngest social media Ambassador! She will be posting about RootsTech on her mom's social channels at the end of this month. I'm excited to check out her posts and see RootsTech through the eyes of this youth. You can follow along at:

Keep Moving Forward With Me
Instagram
Twitter
Facebook

Lily is currently working on Indexing records and will soon be helping to teach 9 and 10 year old girls how to Index at her Stake Activity Day event. She has taken family names to the temple three times since The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announced, as of January 1, 2019, that worthy 11 year old youth can now participate in temple ordinances.

Lily's family participates in family history adventures. Recently they visited Fillmore, Pine Valley, and Cove Fort; all small cities and towns in Utah. In Fillmore they found a museum and walked through a hallway where the walls were covered in old photos. There on the wall were photos of some of her Ashby ancestors! They also visited the local cemetery and took photos of the headstones. While at it they took photos of other graves and uploaded them to Find a Grave so other families can find headstone photos.

Lily is researching the Zacher surname from Germany and wants to learn more about all her family lines. She is particularly interested in family stories and in locating more family photos.

If you are attending RootsTech this year, look out for Lily and if you see her, make sure to tell her Hello!

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If you'd like to participate in a spotlight, please check out this post for more information:
Family Historian Spotlight

Family Historian Spotlight

There are as many different ways to do family history as there are individual people. 

I am starting a new family historian spotlight on my blog to highlight individual people in their family history journey. I hope that through these spotlight posts you will be able to identify the similarities you may share, the differences in how and why others do things, and the uniqueness of each person. I hope that you will celebrate and learn from one another and possibly connect with a new cousin along the way. 

Everyone has a story to tell and I'd love to spotlight everyone who would like to share their family history story.

I am inviting you to participate in this new adventure with me. If you are interested, please fill out the embedded form below. Or share the link. https://bit.ly/2N0KIsS

Please share with your family or friends who may be interested.

RootsTech 2019 Giveaway Winner - John Smith

John Smith

Congratulations to the winner of my FREE RootsTech 2019 Registration - John Smith!

John first became interested in his family history as a young boy. On most Memorial Days he would ride with his father to Castle Gate, Utah and then to a cemetery in Spring Glen to care for and place flowers on his grandfather's grave. His grandfather was killed in the 1924 Castle Gate Mine Explosion. When John's own father passed away when John was 23 this left a lot of unanswered questions about his family story.

John's niece, Kimberly Nelson Savage, winner of my 2017 RootsTech pass, has been pursuing the research into this explosion and has found detailed information about their family. When Kimberly shared all this information with John, she claims he just rolled his eyes. However, his interest has since grown to where he wants to connect not only with the family tree but desires to know the stories of his ancestors.

John is President and co-founder of Premier Software Associates, which provides software and consulting services for hospitals, and he is married with three incredible children.

He is excited to be attending RootsTech 2019. His father served in WW II and he is interested in pursuing more research in war and military records. He is hoping to travel to areas his father served in Europe. He is also seeking ideas for how to keep the memories but not all the stuff. A great class at this year's RootsTech is: Heirloom, Documentation or Junk: What to Keep or Toss


Thank you to those who entered my giveaway contest here on my blog. I hope to have other fun giveaways in the future.

This year I had one required question to enter my giveaway:
How old were you when you first became interested in family history / genealogy?

Of the giveaway entrants:
34% became interested before the age of 13
48% became interested before the age of 19
78% became interested before the age of 30

The youngest was age 2 and the oldest was age 50.

I'm going to write future posts about those who are interested in family history in their youth.

I utilized Rafflecopter to run the giveaway. To select the winner the Rafflecopter software utilizes Random.org to ensure true randomness. I shared my blog post organically via Facebook and received 455 Facebook views from the shared post on my Facebook page; I also shared via Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest.

For some more numbers, that may be interesting only to me:
186 people viewed the blog post
47 people entered the giveaway
158 entries from those 47 people

Two of the entry options of my giveaway were to come back to my blog everyday and read another post and/or visit the RootsTech website and identify another class; which resulted in one/two additional entries each day.

The winner had 5 entries. The most entries had by one person was 7.

This year I had about half of the social views as last year, but nearly double the amount of entrants.

Thank you again for participating in my giveaway! I look forward to seeing you at RootsTech 2019!

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I am a 2019 RootsTech Ambassador and have received a free conference registration from RootsTech.

#RootsTech