Family History Dept Family Dinner

Tuesday, August 19

The Family History Department sponsored a dinner/activity night that we attended.  It took place at a park in Murray (?).  It was M&M's last day of marching band camp so she wasn't able to attend with us.  The food was pretty good and the kids really enjoyed the activities afterwards - bouncy houses and slides, face painting, balloon animals (which we had to wait in a really long line for), snow cones, some type of craft with bandanas - and I think the older kids and DH played some badminton as well.  Here are a few pictures I took during the evening:

I loved watching how MJ went down this slide!  I was impressed that she actually did it because she is not a big slide lover!

Cute picture of all the kids - except for Kitty's eyes being closed.  MJ is quite the character!

Memorial Day 2013

Monday, May 27

We spent the morning & afternoon driving to some cemeteries where we have ancestors buried.  Billiongraves.com has an app that you can download to your smartphone or ipad and then go and take pictures of headstones that can then be uploaded to their website with the gps location.  You can also transcribe the info on the headstones so that they can be searchable from their website and the church's familysearch.org website.  We started out at the Brigham City Cemetery and did some headstones there that were not on Billiongraves yet and then we drove farther north to a tiny town called Avon and actually took pictures of all of the headstones in the cemetery.  It took a little while but we got it done.  I have since uploaded the pictures and we have transcribed most of the headstones although we still have a few to do.  The hardest part was that with it being Memorial Day, a good number of the headstones had flowers or flags or something in front of them so we had to move them out of the way to get a clear shot of the headstone and then put them back.

After we were done with that we finally made it down to my parents' house for a late dinner (we took a lot longer that we thought we would) and then we had birthday cake for my brother-in-law's birthday.

RootsTech 2013

Thursday, March 21

Back in October, DH sent me some info about the RootsTech genealogy conference being held in March of 2013.  Through his work I was able to get a discount on the conference fee and decided to try attending the Thursday (opening) day of the conference.  This is a genealogy conference put on each year by the church and it used to be just technology related, but this year they wanted to expand it to have more classes available to anyone that wanted to attend.  The conference used to be put on in conjunction with BYU and they have condensed that part of into just one day, Friday.  It is a 3 day conference but with my kids and my parents' schedules I thought that Thursday would be the best day for me to go.  So my mom came over in the morning to watch the girls and DH and I took Trax downtown and spent the day at the conference.  We purposely attended different classes to get the most out of the day but we were together for the opening keynote speakers and then walked to City Creek Center for lunch.  It was a fun day and I am definitely looking forward to possibly attending more things like this in the future as my younger kids are getting older.

Temple trip

Saturday, February 23

We finally made it to the temple to do some baptisms with Luke and M&M.  We had a day set aside a couple of weeks ago but then something came up with M&m and we had to put it off.  Then our temple closed for 2 weeks for some cleaning and the Draper Temple was closed the week before and overlapping one week.  So the Saturday before ours opened we drove over to my parents' house and dropped off the younger kids and then drove up to the Draper Temple with M&M and Luke.  We had had some snow off and on that morning and the parking lot at the temple was pretty snow covered.  When we got into the temple DH and I needed to go upstairs to get some family cards printed for the work we were going to do.  It was a neat experience seeing DH baptize first M&M and then Luke for some of our ancestors that we have done research on and found.  Then they all changed into dry clothes and DH was able to confirm them.  I'm glad that we were able to do that as a family and look forward to more opportunities as we find more family members that have not had their work done.  M&M and Luke each did 10 names and we still have a couple that we didn't do that day.

Lost, then found

On January 30th I had taken a couple of family history stories with me to my infusion so that I could type them up onto my ipad.  When I came home I remembered taking them out of my backpack and putting them down somewhere so that they wouldn't get smashed in my backpack.  It wasn't until the following week on February 7th that I went to look for the stories again so that I could finish typing them up and I couldn't find them anywhere.  I spent the next day and a half searching the house from top to bottom and even looking through the garbage and recycling cans outside several times and I still could not find them anywhere.  When DH came home from work on Thursday I told him the bad news and he was almost sick to his stomach that those stories may have been lost for good.  I am not sure where I got the stories - I think from my dad's sister who has quite a bit of family history info that I would love to get copies of.  I was more irritated with myself for losing them and I was pretty sure that someone in the family would have copies of them.  Finally in the middle of my cleaning up and going through papers I found some flute music of mine that I needed to put away and when I opened the drawer where I keep my flute stuff, there were the stories under some of my music.  I think what happened is that I had been practicing my flute the week before to prepare for a choir number for ward conference and when I cleaned up my bed that evening I accidentally grabbed the family history stories with my music and put them away together in the drawer.  I was so glad to have found them and I went and finished typing them up right away so that I would at least have another copy on my computer if they were to get misplaced again!

New calling

Sunday, February 4

Last week DH was called into the stake offices to be extended a release from his Ward Finance Clerk calling.  He has been a little bummed because he has really enjoyed that calling.  He has served there for a little over 4 years now.  I guess our new bishop felt that he had served there long enough and wanted to do some switching around.  Today DH was sustained as a family history consultant in the ward.  The bishop would like him to head up family history work in the ward and to teach a class on it during the Sunday School hour.  He is also supposed to help out with our ward Relief Society meeting in April.  The week after DH was sustained he was approached by several people in the ward wanting to know when his class was going to be starting up because they want to take it and are excited to get some help with their family history research.

I am a little bummed because I would love to help him out with that class but I really can't because of my calling in the primary presidency!

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!)