Holiday dinners are a time when grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles gather around the table and catch up on what’s new.
It’s also a time to share the old — stories about great-uncles who fought in the Civil War, where the family originated, what they did and where they lived.
If older generations of your family are gone, you can recover your family’s stories by researching your family tree in Clinton, even if your roots don’t lie in Henry County.
The place to do it: the Family Research Center at Clinton’s Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. The center, which has three computers, is open to the public on Thursday nights at 7:30 p.m., with no strings attached, other than the cables connected to the printer.
Use of the Family Research Center and the Family Search program is free. Family Search is also available at the Henry County Library, but for those who need help getting started, the LDS center is staffed by two computer-savvy young men, Seth Ballantyne and Blake McCosh.
“They are very educated and are here to help us with any snags,” said Jerry Anspaugh, “and there will be snags.”
Jerry, a 1971 CHS graduate, said he has traced his family tree back 17 generations on the Anspaugh side, he said, to a town in Germany called Anspach, the original spelling of the family name. The farthest back he has gone is a man named Ambrosias, 1440 - 1520.
“I keep hoping as more people add their history, I can make connections so that I can go farther back,” Jerry said.
Family Search is a version of ancestry.com, and can link your search to genealogy research other people have done.
Jerry, whose family moved to Clinton when he was 9 years old, said he had zero knowledge of his family history before discovering the computer program. At the LDS Family Research Center, he has found his family’s roots with the help of Ballantyne and McCosh, Mormon missionaries who are serving their two-year assignments in Clinton. Mormon missionaries now use social media to spread the word, they said, and no longer go door to door.
”It might have worked in the past,” Elder McCosh said. “but it’s no longer the most efficient way to reach people.”
They follow up after people respond to their Facebook posts and express an interest, they said.
“That’s our knocking on doors now,” Elder Ballantyne said of Facebook.
Elder McCosh said what’s neat about Family Search is that there is an app you can put on your cell phone called “Find My Relatives Around Me.” When Elder Ballantyne and Jerry used the link, branches of their family trees popped up, showing that they are ninth cousins once removed. The name of the relative they have in common and boxes with the names of the generations in between also appears.
There’s also a “Famous People” link on Family Search. Elder Ballantyne, who grew up in Eastern Oregon, discovered he is related to John Wayne and Walt Disney. Ballantyne grew up in a farming family and plans to study agriculture at Brigham Young University, he said.
Elder McCosh is from Lewisville, Idaho, and plans to study data management at BYU, with the idea of supporting himself while pursuing a job in his real interest, tailoring.
Jerry found out that his ancestors were employed as soldiers as well as farmers. In the early 1700s, he found an Anspach named Johannes Balthazar (“Balt”), who wound up serving the British crown. Balthazar was rewarded by passage to the New World, Jerry said, where he accepted an indenture working in the tar and pitch industry, crucial to ship-building.
Balthazar was recruited to fight against the French in the New York area, Jerry learned, and although he was told his family would be taken care of, found them in poor shape when he returned. So Balthazar packed them up and migrated to the Midwest.
Founded in 1830 in New York, the LDS church has packed up and moved across the country due to persecution, ending up in Salt Lake City, Utah. The church is at the forefront of genealogy research, having compiled birth and death certificates, census records, obituaries, wills and deeds, and entered photocopies of the documents online. Then the records were indexed, Ballantyne said, allowing online access with a click.
Previously, genealogists had to travel to county courthouses to track down documents, spend hours at libraries spooling through reels of microfiche searching for obituaries, or drive back roads searching for family gravesites.
Mormons have an added incentive to find their roots. Like Catholics, who believe that prayers can speed the souls of the departed into the presence of God, Mormons can retroactively gather their ancestors into the fold by performing ordinances in the Temple, including baptism, confirmation and ordination.
“We believe that we are able to give them the chance to accept saving ordinances,” Elder Ballantyne explained. “They can still make the choice to accept or reject them, still have the agency of free will.”
The hope behind saying prayers, lighting candles or performing rites in the name of a departed family member is that all souls will be reunited in heaven — like at the Thanksgiving table, but without the fighting over who gets the last piece of pumpkin pie.
As Elder McCosh explains, “The highest degree of heaven is being with our family.”
That sentiment is something people may not appreciate until a generation of their family has shuffled off the mortal coil. Thanksgiving is a good time to ask older relatives the birth and death dates and places of parents and grandparents, and fill in the details of those war stories.
Another way to trace your family tree is to buy a white tablecloth and have everyone present at Thanksgiving dinner sign their name on the cloth with a laundry marker. You can use markers with different color ink, or if you’re handy with a needle, embroider the signatures with different-colored thread, creating a family heirloom that can be added to, through the years.
The family-signature tablecloth Deb Mills of Clinton started creating in 2001 was featured on “Good Morning America” in 2016.
Coming in February from Family Search is “RootsTech 2024,” a three-day global conference with keynote speeches and classes by genealogy experts. The conference is hosted by Family Search International. Registration, which is free, is online at familysearch.org. RootsTech is available as a virtual meeting on Zoom, the elders said.
Jerry said the LDS church provides the Family Research Center close to home because the church is part of the Clinton community.
“We want to help people find their families and start their family trees,” he said. “We have lots of tools to help them.
“You don’t know what you’ll find,” he adds, “but that’s the beauty of it.”
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is west of Clinton off Hwy. 18 (Ohio street) at 297 NW 40th Rd. Services are at 9 a.m. on Sunday mornings. Call 660-864-0122.
