My Dash: Week 15

Today we had our Stake Conference broadcast.  I was in and out with baby L, but I heard genealogy and family history mentioned several times. I was especially impressed with the story Sister Bonnie Cordon shared about a young boy enjoying searching for his ancestors names. I made a mental note to do an FHE lesson on that soon.  Now big sister A is old enough to read easily on her own - she can start using Family Search and making her own genealogy book.
That made me think back to my first experiences with family history. I know I learned to enjoy it at a young age and was trying to think how that happened.  I remember giving a talk in primary about my clock making ancestors and dad helping me make the cool plaque of tools hanging in my boys room now.

We also had a bunch of their tools and a jeweler's lathe in our basement for awhile.  I remember pulling out the drawers of a little desk and looking at all the tiny tools and parts.
We had an FHE lesson on genealogy and mom gave us each our own book with family tree pages that we could use to copy everything down from her book.  I always loved thinking about other countries and I was so curious to learn about the places that my ancestors came from. I went to the genealogy library and looked at microfiche with Sister Stermer once.  I remember that seemed complicated and was pretty overwhelming.
 Goomie told me lots of great stories of her family that I was able to write down in my scrapbook. My favorite one was about how when she was a little girl she set a goal to go down the sledding hill 100 times.  She was determined and did not give up or go inside until she had done it! I also loved hearing about her Grandma Horst. She laundered and mended clothes to earn money. She was also a midwife and delivered 49 babies. She did not have much money and worked hard for what she had, but she loved to treat her grandkids (Goomie and Aunt Janice) to an ice cream cone for 5 cents.  Once again I realize how lucky I was that Goomie lived close by so that we could hear all her stories.  Goomie took me once to a cemetery where some of our ancestors were buried (on one of our road trips) to New Jersey or Pennsylvania.