Happy Memorial Day
Category: Temple and Family History Work
Making Progress
These are screenshots that illustrate some of my personal goals. The above screenshot is from the Gospel Library app. I am working to electronically mark my favorite quotes from church leaders at the last general conference, tagging quotes so can search them by topic. I began by reading a talk each day, starting sometime in January and ending last week. I marked favorite passages as I read. Now, each day I go back through the marked passages and add some topic tags. It is a drop by drop kind of project.
The next image is a screenshot from the Family Tree app, showing that my short, set appointments each Thursday to work on family history are yielding results. In two months, I have been able to contribute more than any year recorded here.
It is not my intention to brag, but to illustrate how tiny daily and weekly efforts are making a difference in my life!
anytime you do anything that helps anyone…
One of the sweetest experiences happened recently when I was feeling sorry that I wasn’t better at family history work. I have a goal to work on family history research each Thursday for a certain amount of time, but perfectionism paralysis keeps happening when I search for family names. So, lately I have been indexing records on Family Search to fill my goal quota of time. It feels mostly like a defeat when I turn to indexing instead of working on my own family line. Fear of entering my family names wrong has really been chasing me.
So, I prayed about it, and said I was sorry I wasn’t more brave. I expected some direction from the Lord about how to fix my paralysis, but instead, I felt unreserved love. Also, I felt assured that I am doing family history work that I hadn’t thought to claim. I may need a guide to help me with my Finnish family line, but there is plenty I can do without assistance, and lots of things that I AM doing to help.
“Anytime you do anything that helps anyone—on either side of the veil—take a step toward making covenants with God and receiving their essential baptismal and temple ordinances, you are helping to gather Israel. It is as simple as that.”
Russell M. Nelson, “Hope of Israel,” worldwide devotional for youth, June 3, 2018.
Temple time
Old photos
Slowly, I am thinking more about my grandmother. I think it hurt too much to look at photos or read her writing after she passed away. A few days ago, I read her last message and looked at a few pictures and it didn’t kill me. I listened to her voice, recorded on my phone, and I didn’t cry.
I packed up a bunch of pictures right after she passed away and they spilled in my car on the way home. Every few weeks I discover another picture I didn’t find when I cleaned things up. If I make a sudden stop, this tends to bring them out of their hiding places. It’s like I have been showered in pictures since she left us. She was a little mischievous and LOVED being surrounded by photos. I like to think she smiles as I find these happy old memories.
Refrigerator Gallery
I look at the current collection of photos on the refrigerator and think how much has happened since the last time I replenished this casual little photo gallery. 2021 has been a big year. A milestone year. And now the summer of 2021 is gone. I have so many photos that are refrigerator-worthy this year and it’s a little daunting to decide how to use them all.
Beyond the refrigerator gallery and a few framed photos around the house, I make a photo album each year. In the early days my albums were scrapbooks, but eventually I embraced professionally printed photo books, which are a much better choice for us. I try to label everything with dates and places and people because these are the details of our lives that I don’t want to forget. I have learned to include photos of the mundane things, not just milestones in our photo books.
This Labor Day weekend, I plan to refresh the photos on the refrigerator to embrace the new season, our last season with Tim for a long time. And in a few months, we’ll have photos of scenes from the South Pacific to brighten the space. My refrigerator photo gallery is a reminder of where we have been, and as I update the photos, it reminds me that there are always exciting things ahead to take the place of our current milestones. We are not meant to stay in place.
UFOs
Here are some sound effects to play in the background as we take a scroll through some of my UFOs (UnFinished Objects).
not pictured:
Tim’s missionary list
It doesn’t bother me to have some unfinished things. It just means that good times are ahead as I finish them. The priority is all of the mission stuff for a while.
Photo Day
We sorted my grandmother’s photos and a few objects from her home today. For me, the big treasure was a photo of Alli, my great-grandmother, vibrant and beautiful. There were many things to see: passports, Army memorabilia from two world wars, photos, and keepsakes… It was exhausting to comprehend it all, and it was a very sweet experience.
Light on a Darkened Stage
One of the nicest things someone has done for me lately is to ask to read a short book of family history that I wrote. She not only read it, but took the time to compliment me when she returned it. She asked questions about people and noticed that I had written it when I was raising small children. She said she liked my ancestors. It really made a difference to hear every word from this valued friend.
The time my friend invested to read and tell me good job was like someone shining a light on a dark stage, recently darkened by the passing of my grandmother and our kids growing up. Thank you, J for shining a light.
Digitized
We borrowed our family history center’s photo scanner and I enlisted help from our oldest kids and Richard to scan hundreds of photos one evening this week. It is the most amazing thing to suddenly have digital copies of photos taken before we had a digital camera. It makes me happy and it was so easy.