It’s early on a Saturday morning in Southern California, in the late 1960’s. The aroma of fresh waffles is already starting to fill the house as I peek into the kitchen. My brother’s baseball card collection covers  about half the table (and Mom will make him clean it up before breakfast). I can already guess where Dad is: he’s probably at the work table in the bedroom, doing genealogy … again.

I peek in, and sure enough, he’s hard at work at the seemingly unending task of copying pedigree charts and family group sheets—by hand, of course. Only this is no hurried scribbling; he is slowly and carefully producing small works of art with his beautiful ink calligraphy, bringing a new-found life to the monotonous stack of forms.

I say good morning and ask how he’s doing, and he relates a short tale about the ancestor he is researching and how we are related. In typical teenager fashion, I say something like “Oh, that’s nice” and head into the kitchen to check out the upcoming waffle feast.

Over the years, those frequent images of my dad at his work table and the snippets of conversations about relatives began to sink into my senses. Of course, now I wish I had paid more attention to the stories and names that he related (and repeated). To be sure, he was working in a much different era: no internet or email, and no computers. Collaborating with others on genealogy meant sending letters in the mail and waiting sometimes weeks for replies, which were sometimes “Sorry, I don’t have any information for you.” But he persevered, and over time gave me one of the most precious gifts I could acquire in this life—a love of family history.

Why was he so enamored with family history? An obvious answer could have been that our family was raised as members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and family history is woven into the cultural fabric. Yet there are many Church members who haven’t yet discovered a passion for it. In my dad’s case, there was more to the story: his father had left the family when my dad was about 10 years old, and he was raised mostly by his mother. He talked very little about the separation as our family grew up, but he painted some pretty amazing word pictures of life in the Depression Era, always seeming to find the best things about the people and the places he knew.

For my dad, family history was also about living people. He made it a priority to reach out to aunts, uncles,

cousins, etc., and stay in touch with where they were and what they were doing. He was, in a sense, a family bridge that spanned the canyons of time and distance in the lives of our extended family. Although it has taken a while, I have begun to more deeply appreciate the connections he maintained and nourished, and how they are an essential part of family history for each of us. Beyond the stack of pedigree charts on the table, and beyond the boxes of photos waiting to be filed, he had discovered and honored the people that made up the fabric of his life story.

Another way he reached out to others—and I only recently discovered this by re-reading his journal entries from years ago—was that he served as an enumerator for the 1950 U.S. Census in Southern California. Because he had been raised in Mexico, he was fluent in Spanish, so he did his census work in predominantly Hispanic areas. I’m excited for the 1950 Census to  come out, and it will have a special meaning for me.

Fast-forward to today … we have the most amazing resources at our fingertips for doing family history work, including—you guessed it—The Family History Guide. But it all runs on love. Thanks, Dad, for showing me how it works. And on Father’s Day, we thank the amazing men in our lives who understand what family is about, and make sure we do, too.