Preparing to catch up on Family History

Hey, we finished Preach My Gospel!

I don't know that my approach to missionary work will change now, but there is another shift lately, which is that Aaron is out of prison.

That is just the beginning of a lot of changes for him, but on my side, we have posted on each others' walls on Facebook, chatted over the internet, and chatted by phone. I wanted to write him 3-5 page letters every week, and I would fall short of that, but still, that was something that is no longer necessary. Continuing to be supportive doesn't change, but there were things I was trying to do that were time-consuming, and that specific need has changed.

I am finding plenty of other needs to fill, but there are two things that have been coming to my mind a lot, and so I am going to make my those things a big part of my Sundays. One will be writing to my Plan children and my cousins. There are four or five Sundays in a month, so it should be possible to write to all of my children once a month, and to write to the cousins once a month. The other thing will be working on family history.

I think I need to give some background on that, so everything will make sense.

My parents joined the Church after they were married, but my father stopped going a few years later, as did my brother. There have been cousins who joined, and then stopped going, so there have never been a lot of members in the family.  Right now, my mother, two of my sisters and I have temple recommends, and I think I have a second or third cousin who does also, but also female. The point of that is that there are not a lot of people available for ordinance work, and no males.

If that is an obstacle (and it is), we have been given great blessings in other ways. My paternal grandmother was interested in genealogy, and one of her cousins and one of her husband's cousins were both really into it, giving us a wealth of information on both the Harris and Stone sides.

I first got into it in junior high, when we had the option of doing either a family tree or an immigration map for a social studies project. I did a great family tree. I found a big box full of information that my father had gotten from my grandmother, and laid it all out.

There were things that were interesting, like finding seven men listed as Revolutionary War soldiers. I later found out that some of the information had been organized for applications into the DAR and DAC (Daughters of the American Revolution and Daughters of the American Colonists). There was an ancestor who had lived to be 105 years old and had baked bread for Washington's armies.

There were also things that were sad. One family had lost all four of their children in two weeks time from black fever. Obviously they had other children, or they wouldn't be among my ancestors, but it must have hurt. My great-grandmother had written a life history, and she wrote about the night her husband died, and the loneliness she felt, and my grandmother coming in to her bedroom to comfort her.

For me, family history became about reuniting families because I felt how painful their separations must have been. I submitted my first family names in junior high, when you filled out sheets by hand and mailed them to Salt Lake, and then another a few years later.

Things were dropped in my lap so often, where a cousin would send me a stack of pages of genealogy, and I would feel like it happened because they were ready and they wanted their work done. I was not the one researching, I was just the secretary, but I was glad to fill that role.

When PAF came out and I typed everything into the computer, and that was good because I had it done before Dad left and took everything away. As the process developed with the technology, I knew someday we would be able to submit names from home, and when that happened I went crazy.

I knew I should work my way back in an orderly manner, but I thought of all of these people who might be scattered here and there, and have to wait, and I sort of did this submission of over 300 names, just to get done before I started being orderly. I bit off more than I could chew.

There have been some great experiences along the way, but also, I need to work through this, and get these cards completed, and then start being orderly and only working with small batches. So, a little time every Sunday is going to go to that. I have asked the High Priests group for help, and that got some names done. I gave a bunch of cards to someone to do years ago, who was at the temple all the time, so it should not have been a problem, but still nothing. Today I sent a reminder message to him, trying to work out a way to get the cards back. One step at a time.

So, if anyone doesn't have their own family file names to do, I can hook you up. And while I don't know a lot of the research side, I can recommend some good ideas and bad ideas about your own submissions.