The following is excerpted from the Church Newsroom. To read the full article, CLICK HERE.
Elder Gerrit W. Gong of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and his wife, Sister Susan Gong, dove into their Chinese and Irish ancestry during Family Discovery Day (March 4, 2023) at the 2023 RootsTech global genealogy conference.
In the pre-recorded 46-minute broadcast, embedded below, the Gongs visit Hawaii and Ireland to walk where some of their ancestors walked.
“We’ve come to Hawaii to discover more about our family history,” Sister Gong said. “Earlier this year, we made a similar pilgrimage to Ireland for the same purpose.”
“We say our family because ever since Sister Gong and I were married, I have felt her Irish ancestors are my family,” Elder Gong said.
“And I have felt that I’m part of his wonderful Chinese family,” Sister Gong added.
In Hawaii, they visited a sugar cane plantation where some of Elder Gong’s Chinese ancestors worked after immigrating to Hawaii as contract laborers in the late 1800s. They walked across lava fields that Elder Gong’s maternal grandfather traversed to get to Kona. They visited Elder Gong’s grandparents’ graves. And they stopped at Honolulu’s Bishop Museum, which contains some 90,000 negatives donated by Elder Gong’s photographer grandfather.
In Ireland, they met James Lindsay, a distant cousin of Sister Gong. They visited a cemetery where some of Sister Gong’s Lindsay relatives are buried. They also stopped in Athenry to see the land farmed by her Cunningham ancestors.
To read the full article, CLICK HERE.
