On September 23, 1995, President Gordon B. Hinckley presented what has become the Church’s definitive statement on the family. This inspired proclamation is titled “The Family: A Proclamation to the World.”
Families are important to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Elder Russell M. Ballard pointed out that we “place particularly strong emphasis on family as the basic unit of the Church and of society…we put (my words) much focus on extended family, genealogy, and personal family history, providing young and old with a stronger sense of roots, identity, and belonging. ”
As Elder Russell M. Ballard stated above, the value we place on family extends beyond our immediate families. We also embrace our relationships with our extended families.
My family is fairly close. We still keep in contact with siblings, cousins, grandparents, and even distant relatives. The fact that we are separated by vast oceans and thousands of miles is only a minor inconvenience because of the Internet. We manage to stay in touch and keep up with the important events in our lives mostly through the Internet.
We love emails. It is a lot cheaper than long distance calls. Given the fact that we have family in different parts of the United States as well as different countries of the world, emailing is our preferred mode of communicating. Of course, we still pick up the phone and talk whenever a time sensitive issue comes up or when we just need to actually hear each other. I like emails because I can check it at my convenience. Since we all live in different time zones, we don’t have to worry that we’re calling someone in the middle of the night.
We also use sites such as MyFamily.com. We’ve had a family site on MyFamily.com for many years now. We post everything that is new in our lives such as our kids comings and goings and anything else we want to share. Recently, a sibling posted news about his son’s football game in Hawaii, while another sibling in Nevada posted pictures of their newborn. One of the greatest advantages of sites like MyFamily.com is the fact that you decide who can have access to it. Therefore, you can rest assured knowing that the information you exchange is available only to those that are signed up with your family site.
Another site that we use is Flicker.com. This site is primarily for sharing photos and pictures. Think of it as an online photo album. You can sort your pictures into different categories and even add descriptions and any other information you want. This is a much better site for sharing photos than MyFamily.com. If you have boxes of photos and are worried about losing them, I suggest that you consider digitizing them and storing them on a site like Flickr. I have a friend who lost all her precious photo albums when her basement flooded. Precious birthday and wedding photos among many others were all destroyed. You should consider electronic storage for your photos even if you don’t use a service like Flickr. You can store them on CD or on a USB flash drive. Like the MySpace site, you can also control those who can access your Flickr page.
We even try and get the kids involved. We encourage them to get on and post news about their sports and activities instead of the parents reporting on everything. We have them respond to all the birthday wishes that they get on the family site as well as send their own emails to grandpa and grandma.
These sites and other similar resources on the Internet are great tools to keep in touch with our families. For a family as far flung as ours it is a wonderful blessing. We’ve found that it is important for our kids to know their extended family. For our kids, having a real relationship with their extended family gives them a better sense of their roots.
Today, we are fortunate to have technolgoy that allows us to keep in contact with immediate and extended families. We are even more fortunate that the Internet and Technology is making our search for our ancestors both easier and faster. The Church is also at the forefront of this effort with FamilySearch.org a website that is available to anyone in the world for researching their ancestors and genealogy.
Families are important. I believe strongly that the family is central to our Heavenly Father’s plan and is the foundation of society. President James E. Faust encouraged us to honor four sacred principles in our lives; “reverence for Deity, reverence for and obedience to the ordinances and covenants of the holy priesthood; respect for yourself as a son of God, and respecting and honoring family relationships.”
