"I am yours and you are mine now, through all eternity!"*

For a long time, I've wanted to get involved with my family history.  But I always seemed to have other responsibilities that were a higher priority to me at the time.  I recognized that it wasn't the right time for me yet, but that as soon as I saw the "right time" come along, I should not hesitate.  So with my youngest beginning school, that was one of the first things I focused on.

But how to begin?  I knew little about doing family history work.  I enlisted the help of my good friend who eat, breathes, and sleeps genealogy, and she was eager to help me get started.  For many weeks, she came to my home each Monday morning and guided me as I began my journey.  I am so grateful for her help and patience!  

A few months later (by this time, we were not meeting weekly anymore, as she had gotten me started and I was doing okay on my own), the youth at church had an activity where parents were invited.  At this activity, the youth (and parents) were taught how to use the new.familysearch.org site to find individuals on their family tree who were ready to have ordinances performed for them in the temple.  With a simple click, Acadia was able to reserve names to take with her during their next temple trip.  I was impressed!  Though I had been searching for family members with my friend, I hadn't gotten to the point of taking them to the temple.  This took my interest and joy of family history to a completely new level!

The following week, Ryan and I both attended with Acadia as she performed baptisms for our ancestors.  It was amazing!  Immediately, Acadia turned those names over to us, it was now our turn to continue the work.  It was exciting and almost intoxicating!  I loved being a part of it!  And I was hooked.  A hopeless addict.  :)

I spend, on average, one or two days a week working on our family history.  I love to find stories about my ancestors and share them with my family members.  I have continued to send Cadi to the temple with family names, as recently as last night!  And I have shared names with my siblings so they can help in the work - and the joy. :)  

Working on my family history has also increased my temple attendance.  I am eager to get this work done.  I look for reasons to go, always searching my calendar for another day I can squeeze a trip in.  I love it!  

It is not always easy.  I am stuck on a few names, information has been lost that I cannot seem to find... yet.  I keep looking and I won't stop.  I am learning more about who I am as I learn more about my ancestors.  I have so much more work to do, I don't know if it ever truly ends.  But I am enjoying it so much, I can't hardly call it work.  It is a joy and one of my favorite hobbies now, definitely a big part of who I am today.

*Words taken from the children's song, Family History - I am Doing It.  The words and music to this song can be found here.

A weekend in Sacramento.

I flew out to Sacramento last Friday so I could be there that weekend with my family as my brother attended the temple in preparation to serve his mission later this year. I don't usually get to make a trip home by myself but it just worked out that way this time.  It was a great visit, though short, and I'm so glad I was able to go!

Saturday was a beautiful day!  It was sunny, warm, and gorgeous.  But it was also beautiful in other ways, too.  In addition to being there with Ben, each of our family members took a family name through the temple with us.  Then, after having a quick lunch, we all went back in and spent a few more hours, performing many ordinances, going from start to finish.  It was such a great experience!

At the end of the day, I counted all of the ordinances that we had just completed from our own family history files and found that together, we had performed 106 ordinances!  What a great day!!!

On Sunday, we gathered at my great-aunt and uncle's home for dinner.  It was during the eclipse and we were able to enjoy it together.  It was super cool - none of us had experienced anything like it before!  We started out with the piece of paper that had a hole punched in it, but quickly noticed that we could see the eclipse through ANY object that had an opening for sun to come through.  We used our hands, saw the eclipse through shadows of tree branches, etc.  It was just really neat!

Here are my aunt and uncle.  My uncle's health has been rocky lately, but we are so glad that he is doing better now.  Still, if you ask him how he's doing, he loves to put his arm up to his head and say, "I haven't been well."  He is such a character!

It was such a quick visit but also such a great one!  I had a wonderful time with family and loved every moment of it.  I also loved coming back home to my own family, especially when I found that they had kept up with the housework and even did some laundry.  Awesome!  :)

Girls in the Graveyard

The girls have been asking to play Ghosts in the Graveyard late at night for the last couple of days.  Crazy girls.  So far, that hasn't happened.  But I did take them to do the next best thing - to go "play" in a real graveyard!



I have some friends who occasionally go to the cemetery to clean and photograph grave markers and then one of them, Millie, posts the pics on-line for people who are searching for deceased relatives and/or doing genealogy work.  Ever since I heard about this, I thought it would be fun to join them because 1) I like these girls and it would be a fun way to get some visiting in, and 2) I'm HORRIBLE at doing genealogy and at least this way I'd be doing something to help someone else do theirs! :)

Today the girls and I went for the first time and we had a really good time!  Except for Rori wanting to be her independant self, but what can ya do? ;)  Here are some pics I took of the girls.  I do have a pic here of my friends and I did fail to ask their permission to post their pics, but I don't really have any clear pics of their faces so I think I'm gonna be safe posting them... and if not, they can yell at me and I'll take the pic down right away. ;)

I intended to have Cadi and Julie watch Rori while I helped my friends but Cadi and Julie really wanted to help clean instead.  When we got home, Julie said to me, "It was really fun cleaning the gravestones!"  I think they were suprised at how much fun they had, more they were expecting! :)









Rori even got in on the act for a short time and it was very cute to see her spraying and scrubbing away.  That was the best behaved she was all morning! lol







Yes, Rori is wearing a leash.  I'm sure some of you are totally laughing or thinking I'm a horrible mom but trust me, with this kid, in an open place like this and in a situation where I'm not going to have my eyes on her every second - it's totally necessary!  I half joked that next time I'm bringing a stake to put in the ground so I can just tie her to it. lol  I really am only half joking... really. lol

***Update***  I just heard from Millie.  We took almost 50 pictures today and some were shared headstones, she estimates she may have 75 new people to add to her website.  Here's just one that she was able to add from today's work already.  *warm, fuzzy feeling* :)

The Spirit of Elijah

I've mentioned in here before that I have a MySpace account. *gasp* And I've made some wonderful friends because of it! I've shared about the Vegas Trip I took to meet several of them and the Utah Trip I'm taking in just a few weeks to meet with them again! The other day, I shared with them some of my thoughts after attending a youth fireside on Sunday but I realized today that I never posted my thoughts in here. In the interest of time (and because I'm feeling kind of lazy at the moment), I'm just going to copy and paste...

The fireside tonight was so cool! I loved it!


One quote that struck me so hard that I almost started to cry was something along the lines of this... (I am TOTALLY paraphrasing)... (Oh, and it was by an apostle a hundred years ago, I think it was Ballard, related to M. Russell Ballard)... When the Elders are out finding people to share the gospel with, they are led by the righteous dead to find their posterity so that they will have family who are members so their work can be done.


Something along those lines. She had the youth think about it for a minute - what are the odds that they would be born into an LDS family? How many kids in their school are? How many people in their neighborhood? But they were. And they have ancestors who are righteous and are dead that need their work done. Who is going to do it for them?

I started thinking... Ryan is a first generation member and he loves genealogy work. I can see his righteous, dead ancestors prompting the sister missionaries to stop him when they saw him walking home from school.


My mom's mom joined the church because of a horrible car accident. In that accident, my mom was an infant and not in any sort of car seat or safety belt - just in a baby basket. The car rolled several times and when it finished rolling, my mom was lying in her basket OUTSIDE of the car, with a little pebble sitting on her forehead - not a scratch anywhere. The doors and windows were all closed. My grandma, on the other hand, had several broken bones, including both legs. My grandma has always said that angels saved my mom's life.

As my grandma recuperated at her mom(my great-grandma Aurora - who Rori is named after)'s house, she was bored out of her mind! When the missionaries knocked at their door, my great-grandma turned them away but my grandma called from the couch, "If you've got any literature, I'll read it- I've read everything in this house and I'll read anything you can give me!" ... She joined the church shortly after that.

I can very well see my righteous, dead ancestors being the angels who preserved my mother's life. And I can see them being the very same angels leading the missionaries to my great-grandma's door at a time when my grandmother would not let them get turned away.

My grandma did a bit of genealogy work and my aunt now has it. I need to get it from her.

When Christ was crucified, the very first thing he did was go to the righteous dead in the spirit world and proclaim that they had been redeemed, they were finally freed from their sins. He then organized them into groups to be missionaries, teaching the wicked who were dead. Those were the first two things he did! (D&C 138)


One of the missions of the church is to redeem the dead. Christ atoned for their sins but they still cannot receive all of the eternal blessings if the ordinances are not performed. So we get to do that. We get to be saviors to those who cannot do the work themselves.


It really is an amazing thought.

As I thought about our group, I was thinking how most of us were born in the church - the only one I can think of that for sure wasn't is Jenne... Jennealogy*. The first generation member in our group loves genealogy.


I just don't think this is a coincidence. Jenne, do you doubt for one moment that your righteous, dead ancestors had a hand in you receiving the gospel? Knowing that you would be able to do their work - the life saving ordinances that they could not do for themselves?

I don't.

*Jenne is obviously one of my friends. After she joined the church she fell in love with doing genealogy. Her "on-line" name is Jennealogy. The following is her response to that...

Sariah, you always make me smile. Thank you. And today I especially needed it.


You asked me about my conversion and family history. It was wanting to be with my dad again that compelled me to find religious truth so right there it was the Spirit of Elijah leading me to the church. I started with his temple work and that prompted me to get into family history and after getting started, I was hooked. And its just nice that my name works so well as a family history nickname. :-)

(Jenne's father had pased away a short time before she was introduced to the church. She had previously been Athiest but when she began associating with members of the church through a dance group, she started asking them about their beliefs in life after death.)

Here is the official quote that I paraphrased early on in my post...

"It was made known to me that it is because of the righteous dead who had received the gospel in the spirit world exercising themselves...Elders of the Church were sent to the homes of their posterity that the gospel might be taught to them and through their righteousness they might be privileged to have a descendant in the flesh to do the work for their dead kindred." - Elder Melvin J. Ballard (M. Russell Ballard's grandfather)

I thought, and still think, it is an amazing quote. Thank you Millie for sharing it with me/us!

One day in and I'm hooked!

Today I started working on my genealogy; I began entering my family information into PAF (Personal Ancestry File). To get more information, I e-mailed my mom and dad (and my sister who had done some of this work already too) and my mom got back to me rather quickly with some of her info! :)

This evening, as I was entering the information she gave me, I came across a little treasure. It's so simple and small but for some reason, I just LOVE it! As I entered my great-grandmother, Aurora's information, I noticed that her birthday was my daughter, Aurora's due date. My Aurora was named after my great-grandmother and I feel like that was just a little testimony to me that my Aurora really was meant to be the one named after her great-great-grandma.

I guess sometimes I've wondered why Acadia wasn't the one named after Aurora. But I always knew Acadia was supposed to be Acadia. And now I know that Aurora was supposed to be Aurora. :)

I think I've finally caught the "bug"! As I've entered the information I have so far, I'm seeing dates and realizing that this really IS history! It's my own, personal history! It's where I came from!

As I fed my daughter dinner tonight and thought about the small handful of names I have so far, I thought about how these people had lives too. They had families. They made meals and fed their children. They helped teach their children the skills they would need to survive in the world that they lived in. They had disagreements with each other, they played with each other. They are not just names on a page. They were real.

I'm getting really excited to find more names to enter into PAF. I'm getting even more excited to prepare names to take to the temple! This Sunday the youth will have a fireside on Family History Work. My friend will be leading it and I am really looking forward to it! I'm also looking forward to Tuesday night when I'll take the information I have so far to the Family History Center so I can learn where to go from there!

As I was just starting today, Ryan is a step or two (okay, a few more but who's counting? lol) ahead of me. He was searching for more names and finding family names back in the 1500's. I'm anxious to have my line traced back that far. I am anxious to see it go farther than that!

How exciting this is! It's our own little treasure hunt - I just can't believe it has taken this long for me to catch on!

Isn't genealogy great?

Check this out:


George Bush and John Kerry are related...distantly! It's true. Here's the family tree. It goes way back, to the 1500's.

I find that interesting. Don't you?