The Family History Center is a place where local residents can feel like royalty.
This genealogy center at the local Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has all the resources people would need to research back into their family trees, sometimes far enough to find a link into royal bloodlines.
“If you go far enough back you will link into royalty,” said Sue Whitehead from the Family History Center on Cienega Road across the street from San Benito High School. It is located through the church’s back entrance from the parking lot area.
Whitehead and her husband, Jim, oversee the center. They are three years into what the Mormon Church refers to as a “calling”—while theirs is to oversee that 49-year-old genealogical library of sorts with separate rooms for books, microfilms and microfiche; and the seven computers maintaining a bevy of free programs such as Ancestry.com or MyHeritage.com that would cost individual users a lot of money to buy on their own. A basic monthly membership for Ancestry.com alone—for all U.S. records but not those of other countries—is $19.99. Getting international records would add another $15 to the monthly bill.
The Whiteheads are trying to spread the word about the Family History Center to the general community beyond the church. While discussing the center’s resources late last week, Sue Whitehead made a point of ensuring the message gets out that the Family History Center is separate from the church culture.
She called the center a “service to the community.”
“There seems to be a mindset that if you come in, you’re going to be converted,” she said from the center. “This is totally separate, which is why we come in the back door. You come in here. We’re not going to talk religion. We’re not going to do anything like that. We just want people to get interested. Once you get into the research, it’s quite addictive.”
Whether it’s finding out about a family link to royalty or putting together a family tree—Jim Whitehead’s is displayed on a fan chart hanging on the wall at the center—there are resources and people to help. The center actually has 34 volunteer staff members who rotate shifts. They guide visitors by helping with everything from getting started to researching deep into many so-called family links. The level of staff attention is up to the visitors, the couple said, while the vast majority of research at the center is now done online.
“I would estimate that maybe 95 percent of the activity here is done online,” said Jim Whitehead.
The two of them said they are enjoying their commitment to the Family History Center. It also allows them to spend some additional time together while doing something for which they both have a deep passion. They’ve been married for five years after meeting through a mutual friend. She is originally from England, and he is from Idaho. Most recently they moved to Hollister from Sunnyvale, while he still works a traditional job three days a week in Gilroy.
While they want to welcome the public at large to use the center’s resources, the Whiteheads have found a lot of interesting family linkages of their own. She was already well adept at researching genealogical history when she joined the church, as she had served as director of a family history center in England.
She recalled a story about an English ancestor who went missing in 1904. Nobody in the family, not the relative’s husband or parents, knew what happened. She had disappeared with two small children.
“In actual fact, she got on a ship with an older man and went to Canada, which would’ve been a huge scandal,” Whitehead said. She added how she tracked the woman through Canada and also found out the first husband eventually filed for divorce and the relative many years later remarried with the older man.
“It’s quite a story,” she said. “Those are the sorts of things you unravel. Then it gets exciting.”
Especially with the help of staff members, if needed, they said can track down their own interesting links.
“There need to be a starting place for research in any individuals,” he said. “What we would do typically, we get them set up on a family tree. Then we have them add parents and grandparents. At that point, it’s a lot easier.”
