Damon’s Family History Adventure

We’re pleased to announce the launch of Damon’s Family History Adventure. Damon is my 11 year old grandson.

Over the course of three hot June days in 2024 we traveled 1,150 miles and visited 8 cemeteries, 5 historic sites, 2 temples and had a run-in with 1 wayward deer.

Our mission was pretty simple: I downloaded the people from my family tree and the cemeteries they are buried in. Then I did the same for Damon’s family tree. Then we compared them. Our mission was to simply find those cemeteries where Damon had relatives from all sides of his family.

The result was a crazy adventure that identified not just commonality in the final resting places of our loved ones. The trip revealed a number of amazing coincidences.

Many of our ancestors, though not related to each other at the time they lived, not only can claim common descendants but in many cases they lived near each other, knew each other, and even performed family history research on one another. It was a truly amazing trip that took us from one end of the state of Utah to the other. Here is Damon’s first video introducing our trek and just the first revelation from his family history:

There will be several videos from this series as we share our many discoveries and feelings.

I’m proud of Damon for his interest and his stamina in engaging this project. He’s a trooper. We worked hard for three very hot days and he was just a sponge – asking questions, looking things up, taking pictures and videos as he visited new places and learned about people he can now call family.