Recently, a brand-new database called Relative Finder was released by the Wilford Woodruff Papers Foundation in partnership with FamilySearch. 

This new feature, available at wilfordwoodruffpapers.org, enables users to locate and read firsthand accounts of their relatives mentioned by Wilford Woodruff in his journals, letters, discourses, and correspondence.

Jordan Woodruff Clements, Board Chair of the Wilford Woodruff Papers Foundation, explains how this new feature is creating family ties. “People using Relative Finder are finding hundreds, even thousands, of relatives they didn’t know they had,” he says. “Relative Finder connects people to their relatives and presents them with direct links into the journal entries or other documents within the Wilford Woodruff Papers where they are mentioned or that they personally wrote. These detailed, handwritten documents are now available to anyone searching for family history information.”

The Wilford Woodruff Papers include over 18,000 different people that Wilford Woodruff interacted with over the course of more than sixty-five years. Ed Evans, Chief Technology Officer at the Wilford Woodruff Papers Foundation, says, “Our new database is connected to FamilySearch with 14,000 people currently identified and verified in the Wilford Woodruff Papers database. That means these records are now available to millions of potential descendants.” 

Using data from FamilySearch, the Relative Finder feature combs through the 14,000 individuals identified in the Wilford Woodruff Papers to bring an interactive list of relatives to website users.

“The experiences documented are President Woodruff’s original writings, including a variety of information such as location, the day’s events, other people on the scene, and spiritual insights. Experiences with people, correspondence, mission calls, and other detailed information are personal, new, and uplifting to the people using Relative Finder,” Evans says.

According to Evans, this new tool enhances temple, missionary, and family history work through the personal documents now transcribed and published in the Wilford Woodruff Papers.

The Relative Finder feature is an important milestone in the partnership between the Wilford Woodruff Papers and FamilySearch, which started two years ago with the launch of FamilySearch’s Journey of Faith experience driven by data from Wilford Woodruff’s documents and eight other collections. 

“Our partnership with FamilySearch continues to focus on providing more information, combined with features that simplify and accelerate family history work. Our young adult staff, interns, and volunteers will continue to verify the four thousand unidentified people and make their information available to users from FamilySearch and connected to the Wilford Woodruff Papers database,” Evans says.

The Wilford Woodruff Papers Foundation’s mission is to digitally preserve and publish Wilford Woodruff’s eyewitness account of the Restoration of the gospel of Jesus Christ and make his records universally accessible in order to inspire all people, especially the rising generation, to study and to increase their faith in Jesus Christ. For more information, please explore wilfordwoodruffpapers.org.

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