A Shift at the Family History Center Yesterday was an interesting shift that started off very badly and ended very nicely. For the past two weeks I have been working on a comprehensive Impress/PowerPoint presentation on the resources in the FamilySearch Online Portal. I can't access the portal from home, so I have been going in to the FHC early to work on my presentation. Yesterday I discovered that my file would not open, and I had no backup. I really do know better, but I had neglected something very basic. I tried opening the 90-slide presentation on 4 different computers, I looked for help on the internet, but I will probably need to rebuild the presentation (and a back-up) from scratch. From there, things got better. Brother and Sister Lee were serving their shift when I arrived about 3 PM, and a couple were visiting with them. They introduced themselves as the Lambs from Provo, Utah. They said they work at the Family History Training Center there. I mentioned that I served in FamilySearch World Wide Support with someone who worked there, but I couldn't remember who, so they mentioned some names. Jill Woodbury! I served with Jill Woodbury for at least a year and a half and had frequent contact with her by phone, chat and email. Every week we had a little ML meeting together with Luisa Welsch from FamilySearch. It's a small world! Bill Lamb even took a photo of me to share with Jill. Time passed, the Lees and the Lambs left. I set to work creating a spreadsheet of the Ancestry Institution databases sorted by country rather than by title. I also installed the free FHC software on the last two computers. Before I knew it, Lonni and Whitney arrived for our shift. We were expecting a man to arrive to get help preparing a Family Ordinance Request, and a lady to get help using AncestralQuest to synchronize her database with the new FamilySearch.org. She arrived and I got busy helping her. A young man came in, and then a couple, so we were all busy. I was unfamiliar with downloading ancestors from nFS, but was still able to be some help. I also separated some combined records for Mihaly Hegedus that were causing problems. I also helped find the Hegedus family in the 1916 census of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. (It was indexed as Hagedus, or there would have been no problem. I finally found them by searching Ancestry for all people in that census who were born in Hungary and immigrated to Canada in 1900.) My patron told of the varying results in trying to get information from Saskatchewan on her family. I then told her about the local histories readable online at http://www.ourroots.ca/ In about 5 minutes I found the story of her grandfather's family in the local history of Atwater, Saskatchewan. She was thrilled! It was nearly closing time and the young man was the only patron still there. I asked him his name. Hyde? Any relation to Vern Hyde? Yes! This was interesting. His grandfather, Robert Vernon Hyde, was my cousin or at least a cousin's cousin! I was able to look him up on my personal web site. They were amazed to recognize the same names on my web site that they had been working with on the nFS web site. Indeed, it is an incredibly small world. I hope you are enjoying your contacts with your family, and your research on your ancestors.