Latter-day Saints in Mongolia and the Philippines recently participated in family history events that fostered connection and learning.
Mongolia event
On Jan. 27, the Ulaanbaatar Mongolia West Stake hosted the “Moon and Genealogy” event, organized with the aim of encouraging participants to “respect their national heritage, culture and traditions, and to maintain their genealogy,” the Church’s Mongolia Newsroom reported.
Themed “Our Memory, Our Heritage,” the event included a hearth, traditional music and dance, and a workshop on entering pictures and audio recordings into FamilySearch. It also included a national wrestling event and a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a latest wrestling carpet.
“The members, who spent the entire day with their families and friends … left for home with memories that they are going to cherish until next 12 months’s festival,” the Church’s Mongolia Newsroom reported.
Philippines event
In the Philippines, FamilySearch hosted the “So All May Be Remembered: Celebrating 50 Years of Records Preservation within the Philippines” event on Jan. 11 on the EDSA Shangri-La Manila hotel, the Church’s Philippines Newsroom reported.
Historians, genealogy professionals, archivists, librarians, museum curators, civil registrars, academics, government officials, social media influencers and media members attended the event.
Elder Steven R. Bangerter, General Authority Seventy and the Church’s Philippines Area president, along along with his counselors Elder Yoon Hwan Choi and Elder Carlos G. Revillo Jr., each General Authority Seventies, also attended.
Elder Bangerter told participants that, whatever their religions or reasons for attending, their hearts are united in family history work.
“My dear friends, I think we do what we do due to what we feel after we do it — that inside our spiritual DNA, we understand there may be a connection between us,” he said. “And as we take part in this great work, that connection is woke up.”
The event included a panel discussion with leading Filipino forensic genealogist Todd Sales Lucero; National Historical Commission of the Philippines chairperson Emmanuel Calairo; Catholic Church historian Rev. Father Melquiades Serraon; FamilySearch senior product manager Jonathan Wing; FamilySearch multiarea manager Wayne Metfalfe; and social media influencer Mona Magno-Veluz, who also served because the panel moderator.
They discussed records preservation and accessibility, and the way FamilySearch helps communities maintain access to essential information — especially throughout difficulties like storms and earthquakes.
“Many people don’t know it, but when not for FamilySearch’s and the Church [of Jesus Christ]’s microfilming and digitization efforts, lots of our Spanish-period (and later) records wouldn’t have been preserved in digital form,” Lucero wrote in a column for The Freeman newspaper.
The Church’s first microfilming efforts within the Philippines began in 1973 in collaboration with the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines.
Shortly after, within the late Seventies and the ‘80s, FamilySearch began collaborating with the National Archives of the Philippines, the Civil Registry of the City of Manila, the Philippines Statistics Agency, the Kaisa Heritage Foundation and other religious institutions, equivalent to the Iglesia Filipina Independiente, or the Philippine Independent Church.
Additionally, since 1894, the Church and FamilySearch have partnered with record custodians worldwide to save lots of historical records, leading to greater than 149 million images of civil and church records captured by FamilySearch in over 80 provinces across the Philippines within the last 50 years.
