A New Year's Goal and a New Obsession

Last year a friend of mine talked to me about the family history class that takes place during the Sunday School hour at church.  She urged me to go...and when I found Gospel Doctrine class to be overcrowded, I decided to give it a try.

I don't remember whether it was the first or second class that I attended, but we watched a short video about the importance of doing family history and something that a man said on the video had a real impact on me...He talked about how people lived during the time there was no gospel on the earth--they had no priesthood, no revelations, they lived hard lives and they died thinking that God had forgotten them.

Like most people, I guess I have lived with the assumption that someone, somewhere was doing genealogy work for my family... I mean, you go to the temple, and there are always names there waiting, right?  So someone is doing it... Right?  Well, that might be true for some...

Little did I know that there is an entire line of my family tree that no one has really touched--generations of people waiting for someone to come along and find them.  It has been something of an amazing experience, really.  Not to say that nothing has been done...

My great-grandmother's family (that joined the church in the Netherlands and later immigrated here to Utah) have had all their direct work done (they did their own and their parents when they got here)...but for all the family that stayed in the Netherlands...absolutely nothing.  I have found a couple of Dutch websites from which I am gathering bucket loads of information...names, dates, places...I have filled an entire notebook with them!

When I first started, and had no idea where or how to begin I had an interesting experience...I decided to start with just a plain old google-search of a name way back in the family tree and see if anything came up.  It did--I found someone's Dutch genealogy--and yes, it was written all in Dutch....but the name was there, along with a spouse, eight children, the spouse's parents and siblings that as of that moment had never been entered into the familysearch website.  I stayed up until about one o'clock in the morning, painstakingly copying and pasting information into a translator and writing down the information, filling three sheets of notebook paper.  I kept going, afraid that if I stopped and closed the website I would never find it again.  Once I was satisfied I had everything, I bookmarked the page and shut down the computer.  Just as I feared, when I tried opening that page again the next day, the link was dead.  Although I have searched for it, I have never been able to find it again.

Now here I sit with a notebook full of names--and still I am finding new people every day.  I know it won't always be this easy but it's been nice to be able to get a good start.  It seems like each night as I start searching I find a whole family, and sometimes I find myself getting emotional about it as I realize that they really DID live hard lives--they died young, and they lost a lot of children at a young age. Which has started another new obsession--I want to find information about these people--not just names, I want stories and pictures...I want to know who they were and what their lives were like.

Which leads me to a couple of goals for the new year:

1. I now have 84 names (and counting) that are ready for temple work--there is no way I will get it all done by myself so I'm going to have to enlist friends and family to help me.  Each day the list grows so it's time to get started...some of them have been waiting a long time! (And I apologize in advance to anyone that helps--the names are Dutch--and I know we all look at those names in the temple and take the easiest one to remember and pronounce--these names are NOT those names).  I want to get all 84 of these names done this year.
2. I want PICTURES!  I am determined to hunt down any information I can find about these people, whether it be stories or pictures or whatever is available and put together some kind of history for them.  Someone needs to know them and remember them...
3. I want to encourage others to start on their family history--don't wait for the "old" people to do it!  Even if it's just a couple of hours a week, we ALL have time to spare.  There are so many new resources that make this work easier than it's ever been.