Generations of Time

I have been born of goodly parents...and grandparents...and generations of parents that preceed those parents. There has always been the push for us as Latter-day Saints to find our ancestors but I have guilty of the "there will be a season for that and this is not it" excuse. Sorry I know that comes as a huge disappointment for those of you who thought that I was a avid geneologist. However, I have turned over a new leaf (get it, leaf on my family tree!) and I am going to try to do better. My thought process is that I can really only do temple work for one at a time anyway so if I start with one at a time, it is one more than I was doing. Ok, I know I should be doing more, but this one is going to have to have baby steps to get it done.

Anyway, I found a relative that is on my paternal grandmother's side and Alyssa is going to go do her baptism with the youth today and then I will finish it. I really am very excited to be a part of bringing progression to someone who has my genes or I guess I have hers. I remember going to the temple once - Tom and I thought we were suppose to be there to do sealings at 5 am only to find out that we were 12 hours off - so we stayed and did inititories as we didn't have time to do a session before Tom was suppose to be to work. I was so grateful that we decided to not waste the opportunity to serve as during the inititory process both the temple worker and I strongly felt that the person whose name we were doing was there. The sweet worker said with tears running down her face, "Can you feel that? She is here!" She, the woman whose name was on the pink slip of paper had lived four hundred years ago in a country far from mine during a time when religion was more of a cast system based on when and where and to whom a person was born. She had waited a long time for this opportunity and I believe she knew how important the work being done for her was to her progression. I was honored to be there that day.

I had been scanning through names and dates the other day and in the not to distant past on my mother's side of the family. I realized that my great-grandmother Hillegonda DeBoer died when I was nine years old. I do not remember her. I really don't remember anyone talking about her other than she and my great-grandfather Harm came from Holland to live in the Salt Lake Valley before my grandmother was born. That and they gave me a chest of drawers when I was born or very small which I still have in my possession. Because of this realization, I have decided that it is our responsibility to talk about our ancestors and their lives. How else do they become real to us? Or how else do we learn from their trials? I'm not talking about the preachy, "what not to do's" but respect for what they have been through and learning from it.

You know when you are a child and the teacher asks for some amazing ancestor story. Well I remember being the child who could lay claim to a relative knowing Brigham Young or something like that. Nothing too terribly exciting. Then a couple of years ago, a general authority stood up in our stake conference and told this story about a husband and wife who buried a son in Nauvoo just before the saints were drove out of the city, so they had to leave the grave and travel West. Later, the man was serving a mission and his wife had asked him to go back and rebury the child in another cemetary where he could be found later. He found the grave in disarray and thought not to move it, when a voice told him " Don't leave me here". The man moved the grave and placed a stone for identification so that future posterity would be able to find him. Everyone was so touched by the story about our responsibility to make our past part of our future. As it turned out, that husband and wife where my ancestors, Israel and Elizabeth Barlow. That would have made a great story in primary when I was younger.

Or the story of how Naomi Randell (the woman who wrote the primary song, "I am a Child of God") came to my Grandma Barlow (Helen) and asked her to put together a children's choir in Ogden so that they could sing the song. I didn't learn about that story until my grandmother died several years ago.

I have come to believe that if we want the past to become part of who we are and learn from those who have gone before, we have to know them. Learn to love who we are by staying in touch with that which is good in our own posterity. I am going to attempt to find myself by finding my ancestors. If nothing else, I will have a good story to tell the next time someone asks:)