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RIVERTON -- Looking for your ancestors just became easier at a new family search library in Riverton.
This huge facility will accommodate hundreds of people every day and help them find their roots.
Carole Mikita did.
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Tues-Thurs: 9:00 AM to 9:00 PM
Fri-Sat: 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM
John Mikita is her paternal grandfather. Carole and her brother, Steve, received an ancestry folder with census, immigration and naturalization papers.
"It's one thing to hear stories about your ancestors. It's another thing then to actually have the document in your hand of them coming across on the ship, the actual manifest, the actual census record," said Tim Bingaman, Reference Consultant at the LDS Family History Library.
The new library replaces 24 smaller family history centers in Latter-day Saint meetinghouses in the southern part of the Salt Lake Valley. Everything is now merged into this state-of-the-art facility in Riverton.
Volunteers are inviting residents from West Valley to Bluffdale and from Herriman to Draper. The best part is, you don't have to know how to do anything.
"If you're not comfortable with the Internet, we're going to do classes on the Internetm," said LDS Public Affairs Specialist Paul Nauta. "If you don't know how to do research in certain types of records, there will be ongoing classes."
For those with online skills, the online family history resourceFamilySearch.com is adding records at a phenomenal pace -- the largest initiative of its kind in the world. More than 350,000 volunteers are online helping create indexes to these original historic records, and they're doing a million names a day, Volunteers are always needed.
E-mail: cmikita@ksl.com