Entries by Jeff Westover

Circles of Friends and Family

In April of 2021 we took a road trip to Southern Utah. It would be my Dad’s final road trip, an exploration of family history. It was his desire to connect the names and dates on the family tree to places – places even that he was familiar with from his first years growing up […]

The Honeymoon Trail

Just west of a place out in the middle of nowhere on the Utah/Arizona border called Fort Pearce is a old pioneer trail. In this remote place on this mostly forgotten trail are rocks where at a time in the old west travelers left their mark on red stone in wagon wheel grease. Those marks […]

Kirtland Connections

With the news that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has acquired the Kirtland temple and additional historic sites in Nauvoo the question has come in about our family connections to Kirtland. The individual who comes immediately to mind is Grandfather Gardner Snow, who is the great-grandfather of Muriel Snow, wife of William […]

Family History vs Family Story

Of all the projects at the end of Dad’s life nothing was more passionate to him than the history he was writing of my Mother. He attacked it in typical Dad fashion. He wrote an outline, he gave each salient section an objective, he selected pictures and started jotting down notes of things he did […]

Family History and Tools of Artificial Intelligence

It is kind of stunning how the term “AI” has taken over RootsTech this year. AI stands for Artificial Intelligence and it is revolutionizing the Internet and nearly every industry that uses it. In my book, and I’m going to go on an old man rant here, AI is what gives us toilets that flush […]