If you have been building your family tree with FamilySearch, you may already have generations of names, dates, places, photographs, historical records, and family connections at your fingertips.

FamilySearch can be an extraordinary tool for discovering where your family came from. Its Family Tree is a shared, collaborative family tree that connects information contributed by researchers around the world, while its historical record collections can help uncover birth records, death certificates, census records, marriages, military records, and other evidence about the people in your past.

But eventually, many family historians encounter another question:

What do I do with everything I’ve discovered?

A family tree can document your ancestry. A family history documentary can help your family experience it.

Your Family Tree Is the Beginning of the Story

When you look at an ancestor in your FamilySearch family tree, you may see information such as:

• Birth and death dates 
• Parents, spouses, and children 
• Places where the person lived 
• Census records 
• Military records 
• Immigration documents 
• Photographs 
• Newspaper articles 
• Personal memories 
• Historical sources

Each individual piece of information is valuable.

Taken together, however, those records can reveal something much more meaningful: a human story.

An ancestor wasn't simply born in 1823, married in 1841, appeared in an 1860 census, and died in 1864.

That person lived through particular events, made decisions, raised a family, worked for a living, experienced hardship, and occupied a specific place in history.

That is the story hidden inside the family tree.

What FamilySearch Family Tree Can Help You Discover

FamilySearch describes its Family Tree as a worldwide shared family tree. Rather than creating completely separate private trees for every researcher, users collaborate on profiles for deceased ancestors and can attach sources, photographs, memories, and other information.

That collaborative structure can lead to discoveries you might never make working alone.

A distant cousin may have uploaded a photograph you have never seen.

Another researcher may have located a marriage record.

Someone else may have identified an ancestor's parents or corrected a long-standing mistake.

FamilySearch can also suggest historical records that may correspond to people in the tree, giving researchers additional leads to investigate.

These discoveries help build the foundation for understanding an ancestor's life.

But finding the information and preserving the meaning of that information are two different things.

A Family Tree Shows Relationships. A Documentary Shows Lives.

Imagine opening your family tree and seeing this:

• John Miller 
• Born: 1847 
• Pennsylvania 
• Married: 1870 
• Occupation: Farmer 
• Died: 1923

Those facts establish the basic framework of a life.

Now imagine learning that John grew up during the Civil War, married shortly after the war ended, purchased a small farm, raised six children there, survived an epidemic that claimed one of them, and lived long enough to see automobiles begin appearing on the roads near his home.

Suddenly, he isn't simply another box on a family tree.

He is a person.

That transformation—from genealogical data to human story—is at the heart of what Heirloom Cinema does.

Turning FamilySearch Research Into a Legacy Documentary

An Heirloom Cinema documentary begins with the research your family has already collected.

That might include information from:

• FamilySearch 
• Ancestry 
• Census records 
• Vital records 
• Military records 
• Immigration and naturalization documents 
• Newspapers 
• Family photographs 
• Letters and diaries 
• Cemetery records 
• Maps 
• Family Bibles 
• Oral histories 
• Research completed by previous generations

The goal is not simply to display these materials on a screen.

The goal is to determine what story they tell.

Historical context can help explain the world your ancestors lived in. Maps can show where they traveled. Photographs can introduce faces to the viewer. Documents can provide evidence for important moments. Narration can connect events that might otherwise remain scattered across dozens of records.

The result is a cinematic family history that your children and grandchildren can watch rather than having to reconstruct the research themselves.

Don't Let Your Family History Become a Box of Research

Many genealogists spend decades researching their families. 

They accumulate binders. 

 Computer folders fill with scanned records. 

 Hundreds of browser bookmarks are saved. 

 FamilySearch profiles expand. 

 Ancestry trees grow. 

 Notes are written in margins and tucked into folders. 

 The researcher understands how all the pieces fit together because they made the discoveries themselves. 

 The next generation often does not. 

 Without explanation, twenty years of genealogy research can eventually become a collection of documents that someone else must decipher. 

 That is why preserving the story behind the research can be just as important as preserving the research itself.

Start With One Ancestor

You don't have to turn your entire family tree into one enormous documentary. 

 In fact, some of the most compelling family histories begin with a single person or couple. 

 Look through your FamilySearch Family Tree and ask: Whose story would I most regret losing? 

 Perhaps it is:

• The immigrant who brought your family to America 
• The Civil War soldier whose records you spent years finding 
• The grandmother who held the family together during the Depression 
• The ancestor who crossed the country in a covered wagon 
• The relative whose letters survived World War II 
• The couple whose descendants now number in the hundreds 
• The parent or grandparent whose research started your own genealogy journey

One well-documented life can become the starting point for a much larger understanding of your family's history.

FamilySearch Gives You the Pieces. Your Family Needs the Story.

FamilySearch provides family historians with access to an enormous collection of genealogical information and a worldwide collaborative Family Tree. It can help you discover ancestors, connect generations, locate historical records, and preserve family memories. 

But your descendants may never spend hundreds of hours studying all of those records. 

They might, however, watch a film. 

They might hear an ancestor's story. 

They might finally understand why a faded photograph matters. 

And they might see their family history not as a collection of old names and dates, but as a story that eventually leads to them. 

That is the difference between preserving genealogy and preserving a legacy.

Bring Your Family Tree to Life

If you have spent years building your family tree on FamilySearch, Ancestry, or through your own research, Heirloom Cinema can help transform that work into a cinematic family history documentary designed to be watched, shared, and preserved for generations. 

Your research has already uncovered the facts. 

Now give your family the story. 

[Contact Heirloom Cinema to discuss your family history documentary.]