Monday, January 28, 2013

Family History bug...

I have been catching the family history bug a little bit here and there lately.  There were a couple of nights in a row right before Christmas where I was staying up until 2 in the morning doing some research on the computer.  And then even when I forced myself to go to bed I stayed awake for way too long just thinking.  There are some cool things that I have been able to find just doing research online, especially from some of the census records.  In one case I was able to find a whole family that is a sibling of one of my ancestors who it appears has not had any temple work done for them.  Luke is turning 12 this Friday and DH made a comment that it would be neat to be able to take him to the temple to do baptisms for the dead shortly after his birthday.  So we have set a goal to try and find family names that we can take with us that he can be baptized for and have M&M come and do the female names.  The main reason that I have slowed down the last few weeks is that there are a few family lines where I need to go to the family history library to look up records for and I am afraid that if I do that with too many lines at once I will get too confused on what info I need to look up when I finally make it there.  It is pretty neat the records that have been made available through the church's website and I am slowly getting used to using the new common family tree format and how to make changes with that.

(One comment that I have about the research that I have done so far is that there are way too many people with the same or similar names in England back in the 1700-1900s!!  That is another reason why I am afraid that I am going to get super confused if I do too much at once.  Sometimes it is hard to tell who is who in the records!  And most of my family lines come through England.)

DH has also been working a little on my paternal line and has found some records farther back than we have ever been able to follow the family before.  Right now I have about 12 names that need baptisms done for them that I have reserved.  When I started research on the line where I found the family that needs work done, I went through the steps to reserve the names for the temple work and my eyes just started tearing up.  I really got a strong impression that there is someone there who has been waiting a long time for their work to be done.  (I still tear up every time I think about it.)


Unfortunately I haven't been able to index lately because my computer that I use at home is too old now to run the program on...  I am grateful for the indexing that I did do though because I find that I have a much easier time deciphering the info that is recorded on the family records that I have found and it has been a neat experience.  


I had a strange dream a few weeks ago that DH and I and some other people were sleeping overnight in the temple for some reason.  After everyone else was asleep, I couldn't sleep so I got up and started walking around the temple.  Pretty soon I started seeing spirits of deceased people all around me and I could hear and interact with them.  I also saw spirits outside of the temple who couldn't come in.  I went back to wake DH up and had him walk with me.  At first I thought that he could see the spirits as well but after a little while I realized that he was not able to see or hear them - it was just me.  (I wish that I could say that it was a super spiritual dream, but the spirits that were in the temple with me didn't seem particularly worthy to be there and some of them were doing some pretty strange things...  Maybe I'm not supposed to remember that part though!)

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