Note: This article by Aimee McDaniel was published previously on the Granite Family History Center blog site.

I have been a Temple and Family History Consultant since 2015 and have been doing my own family history research for over 15 years. But recently I stumbled on a well-kept (though I don’t believe an intentionally-kept) secret! While helping a friend to begin his family research I had the challenge of diving into the world of Polish research. I came to a particular question that I just couldn’t find an answer to and – somehow by a miracle – my search pulled up a FamilySearch Community Group that specialized in Polish. I was able to ask the question and, within a few hours, had received an answer from a member of that group who happened to know how to navigate research in Poland! Even after being involved with family history both personally and with a calling in my ward, I didn’t even know there was such a thing!

This got me thinking… I had been completely stuck and without direction on my own family tree and had recently connected with a distant half-cousin who shared photos of our great-great-grandfather’s family record book that he had compiled over several years in the early 1900s. He had written to Danish parishes and relatives and collected original documents. There was a particular birth record that I had looked at a couple times, but upon looking at it closely again, I realized that it wasn’t in Danish!

After discovering that it was written in German, I opened a discussion in the German FamilySearch Group with a picture of my document to find out why I would have a Danish birth record written in German and signed by the Austrian consulate. Five hours later I had received a response from a group member who not only translated the ancient document for me but did a few minutes of research on the surname and found another individual who had posted about this same family!

A short time later, there was a response from another Danish angel directing me to a Catholic Church in Copenhagen where he suggested I start to look for the parish book with the original record. This was the secret sauce my research was waiting for! The help from these two contributors had such an enormous impact on my family history research that I was able to find 11 additional family members. I know in perspective this is just another scratch to the surface, but what a blessing to be able to find those family members and begin their temple ordinances to become part of my eternal family.

I’m so grateful for the angels who participate in the FamilySearch Community Boards. I hope that this will be a tool that will bless your life as much as it has mine. I also hope that if you are someone who is proficient in a specific area of family history research, that you will start your own community board or contribute to one of the few that are currently there.

If you are interested in searching the available FamilySearch Communities, you can link to them here: https://community.familysearch.org/.