Kadena Okinawa Temple and Family History

Have you heard about the annual family history conference called "RootsTech"? It's a multi-day event with inspirational speakers as well as workshops on various topics related to family history. Well, it's that time of year again. RootsTech 2021 will be held February 25th through 27th. (That's Thursday, Friday, and Saturday in the United States, so it will be mostly Friday, Saturday, and Sunday in Japan/Korea.) This year's conference will be 100% online and 100% free. It is a great opportunity to learn more about FamilySearch , learn about family history in general, and be uplifted. Here's the main website for this year's conference: https://www.rootstech.org/?lang=eng . Here's a spot where you can learn more about RootsTech: https://www.rootstech.org/about?lang=eng . Registration is very simple. It takes maybe 1-2 minutes. You can use the live chat function to have a robot register you or you can register yourself here:  https://www.rootstech.org/

Probably the most well-known alternative family history project among Church members is indexing. Most members have heard of indexing and many have participated in it.  What Is Indexing? For anyone unfamiliar or unsure, indexing is a way to digitize documents. Specifically, you type up the contents of historical documents so as to make those contents searchable. A variety of documents have been or could be indexed; some of the most common document types include census records, marriage certificates, and voter records. Traditionally, these documents were maintained in hardcopy and later on microfilm or microfiche . While microfilm/microfiche allowed the documents to preserved in a more space-efficient manner, be distributed far wider than the original hardcopies, and even potentially be uploaded online, there was still a critical shortcoming: the information was still generally inaccessible. Finding information would require a person searching through literally thousands or millions of

For this second of two belated December 2020 construction updates , I'm sad to say the Okinawa Japan Temple again showed no noticeable construction progress as of December 27, 2020: The small silver-lining is that after a few weeks of rainy weather, the sky was back to its normal Okinawa beautiful self. (If you're wondering why this update is a little late in reaching the blog, check out my previously posted confession .)

This is the first of two construction updates from December that I'm posting a little late. There were two reasons for my tardiness is posting: First, my family and I were busy having lots of Christmas fun. Second, there really wasn't an noticeable construction progress. (Then again, maybe mystical dwarves were hard at work underground preparing the ground for the temple foundation and I just didn't hear them.) Here's what the Okinawa Japan Temple site looked like as of December 19, 2020: The barren spaces missing grass are where fake grass had been rolled out for the groundbreaking ceremony .

  A little more than two months ago, I posted about an easy but less common way to participate in temple and family history work: improving place names on FamilySearch . It appears that there has been a lot of participation in this project and a satisfactory amount of data has been collected for the majority of countries and localities. As of January 3, 2020, only the following six location options are now listed: Austria, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Hungary, Mexico, and United States. But don't let these facts dissuade you from participating in this fun and easy family history project.

A few weeks ago, a few videos related to the Okinawa Japan Temple groundbreaking and fireside were released: Brief overview of the groundbreaking and fireside events of December 5th and 6th Full video of the groundbreaking ceremony on December 5th Full video of the post-groundbreaking fireside on December 6th . (For more information on the Okinawa Japan Temple groundbreaking, see our previous post about it .)