Family History

It's quiet around here with Craig at Scout Camp, the girls all working, and McKay mostly swimming with friends.  

So, I've spent some time with my ancestors...

Look at this name!  It doesn't even fit in an iPhone screenshot.

Here's what it looks like on the Mac...

Amazing!  Here's what that note says: 
The full name of Kauwe was Kauwe-a-Kanoa-akaka-wale-no-Haleakala-ka-uwe-kekini-o-Koolau. Kauwe means "the cry." The full name comes from the story of a much-loved queen who died on Maui. Many who loved her mourned her death, and their cries were so loud that they were heard all the way from Mount Haleakala on Maui to the Koolau range on the island of Oahu. (Kona Historical Society) BIRTH: "Genealogy of Tutu Kauwe", paper by Beryl Blackshear Walter et al., 1967. The notes under the picture of Kauwe in "The Shipmans of East Hawaii" by Emmett Cahill, p.147 says that Kauwe was born about 1780 and lived to the age of 104. This information credited to the Kona Historical Society. She lived the last part of her life in a grass house at the foot of the homestead. The homestead is right in the back of Richard Smart's home of Puapelu near Waimea. The land is still owned by the Paris/Hind family.

The more time I spend doing family history, the more I feel very small in this ever-growing tree of people.  And I also feel like a pretty vital part.  A lot of their temple work has been done, but there is so much still to do.  I love this hunt for names and relatives.  Some of them I recognize, and some I've never even heard of.  I love finding out tiny little pieces of their lives and seeing their connection to me.  And I love knowing that because of all of these people, I have the opportunity to be here, in this family, in this church, and living at this time.    

Family Home Evening

Last night, we invited the Grs to Skype into our FHE lesson.  We wanted the kids to be able to ask their grandparents questions about their childhood experiences, early years of marriage and spiritual experiences directly and to be able to hear their answers.  We are very fortunate to have grandparents who, through the miracle of technology, are accessible and willing to tell their stories and who can still recall with great clarity so many of the details of their early years.  

We weren't entirely sure how the night would go, but after the initial question, a great interview took off with a life of its own and an hour later, grandchildren were connected more fully to grandparents, children were connected to parents, and a couple of missionaries gained a little insight for their future discussions.  It was a successful night.  

Savannah started by asking how the Grs met, where they were married, and what their courtship was like.  It was hysterical to hear Grandpa tell his version of that story and then have Grandma come in and have to make a few minor corrections.  

One of the kids asked about the kinds of chores the Grs had when they were children.  I was shocked to learn that my mother-in-law never had to do any chores as a child and never learned to cook because her mother was a bit of a perfectionist and didn't want anyone else to do those things.  She liked her home to look a certain way and she knew that she was the best person to get the job done.  She preferred not to have an additional mess in her kitchen by inviting little hands to help her.  So all these years later, I have to say, I looked at my mother-in-law in a slightly different light knowing that everything she learned about being a housewife, she learned on her own.   Grandpa, on the other hand, was the oldest of five boys and with two working parents, and therefore was primarily responsible for all of the housework and cooking responsibilities after school.  No wonder he can vacuum and sweep better than anyone I've ever met!

We also asked the Grs about how and when they gained a testimony of the church.  Grandma was very candid in her response and told the kids that she didn't attend seminary regularly and that it wasn't until after she was married and pregnant with Uncle Bret that she had a desire to gain a testimony for herself.  And, as with everything else in her life, she decided to do a thing, made a plan, and went forth and did it.  Grandpa told us a story about how he gained a testimony while he was on his mission.  The missionaries were especially touched by their stories and instantly bonded with the grandparents after that.  :)

I can't tell you how happy I was that this night went as well as it did.  Craig and I weren't sure what kinds of questions the kids would ask or how engaged they would be in the answers.  But our hearts completely melted to see Emma and Megan frantically writing down their grandparents' answers, and all of the kids anxious to have the next turn to ask a question.  

I am so grateful to the Grs for the lives they've lived and the wisdom they are able to share with all of us.  And I'm so grateful to know a little more about each of them.  They may have inspired us to do this regularly!  

"Many people desire to know where they come from, but a sense of belonging is especially important for children and youth. A knowledge about their family history gives children of all ages a sense of their place in the world. It can also give young people something to live up to—a legacy to respect. Family history also provides an opportunity for children and teenagers to make a meaningful contribution to something bigger than themselves. 

Encourage children to talk to their living relatives, especially the older ones. Hearing stories about what life was like in the past helps young people connect to the past. This connection brings generations together and establishes strong family bonds.  

Tell stories about your life and the lives of your ancestors. Young people need more than facts and dates. They need the facts and dates packaged in interesting, meaningful, and memorable ways. The best way to create an interest in family history is by telling young people stories about real people. Fill your stories with interesting information, humorous details, and unusual facts that will capture a young imagination. Sharing family stories doesn’t have to be a big event; make it a common occurrence around the dinner table, in the car, or at bedtime." - familysearch.org

Instagram

There are a million reasons that I love Instagram, but this post isn't actually about all of those.  It's really more about Family History.  But I found this inspiration on IG, so that's where the blog post title came from.  

Last week, I discovered this awesome IG account.  They've divided up the Book of Mormon into daily chunks so that readers can finish the whole thing in a year.  Awesome challenge.  Awesome way to start the year.  Awesome inspiration.  

Yesterday's reading assignment was 1 Ne 5:7 - 6:6 and there was a great comment about family history…

Here's what the commenter said (her parents are currently serving as Temple Pres and Matron of the Las Vegas Temple and received this instruction during their training with the Quorum of the 12):

"The best way to assure our kids stay on the straight and narrow is twofold.
1.  Talk to them about EVERYTHING.  ALL THE TIME.  AS OFTEN AS THEY WANT TO TALK.
2.  Teach them about their family history.  Where do they come from?  What sacrifices were made to get them where they are today?  Why are they an important link in the family chain? What will their righteousness (or unrighteousness) mean to the links in the chain?  Don't just make family history about finding names.  Make it about bringing their history to life, and letting them see how important they are in holding together the links of the past and the future."  

She said that family history has taken on a new level of importance for their family.  They get together for FHE once a month with her whole side of the family and Grandma and Grandpa share a personal history moment where they tell stories from their childhood and the grandchildren have a chance to connect with their grandparents in a totally different way. 

I love that idea!  

Unfortunately my parents are no longer here to connect with my kids, but I certainly have a wealth of their childhood stories that I heard while I was growing up.  I don't know that my kids have heard very many of them.  Craig's parents have done a lot of family history work and we have access to all of the personal histories from a couple of generations of grandparents, including Moroni Heiner, Craig's great-great-great grandfather on his mom's side.  So there are plenty of stories to share with our kids to help them know where they come from.

It's really important for me to not just stress the pioneer heritage of Craig's amazing family, but also to point out the ways that my family blazed trails and laid the little bricks along this path so that we could be exactly where we are right now.  They may not have had religious freedom in mind when they came over on boats from Puerto Rico to Hawaii, and they may not have been thinking about getting to the Temple when they traveled across the country from Pennsylvania to California.  But they were thinking about providing opportunities for their children and grandchildren, which is exactly what they did for us.

I am immensely grateful for all of the people who came before me, the ones I knew and the ones I did not have the chance to meet, who worked and made sacrifices so that I could have a college education and find the church and have this amazing family.  And I'm grateful for Craig's pioneer heritage who crossed plains, served missions and settled in the mountains and valleys of Utah so that a future Church could thrive and grow.  

I am so excited for a shift in our upcoming Family Nights and for a new emphasis on all of those amazing people from past generations.  

Boxes of Treasures

These boxes have lived under my desk for 2 years.  They are in my way every single time I sit down at that desk, which I thought would be a great motivation to get myself to go through them and purge things.  But two years later, they haven't moved. (ugh...)

I am an expert purger of things.  I love to haul stuff to the trash or donate it to Goodwill.  But my parents were savers and these boxes are filled with stuff they couldn't bear to get rid of and apparently neither can I.  They're filled with pictures, documents, letters, and memories.  What do you do with all that stuff??  I can't exactly bring myself to throw away old Bibles, my parents' social security cards, yearbooks, and locks of unknown babies' hair, but what do I do with it?  Craig suggested scanning all of it, which is ridiculously tedious, but at least all that stuff would be in a safe place in case of some natural disaster.  But even after scanning all of it, I'm still left with the same problem of what to do with all the originals??   

On Friday night, everyone was busy downstairs watching movies that I wasn't interested in, so I took the plunge and opened a box.

I happened to also be exploring ancestry.com and familysearch.org, so my casual exploration of boxes turned into a pretty exciting night.   For the past year or so, I've been really interested in genealogy and since I have more family than the average person, it's been twice the work and twice as fulfilling. My little family trees are growing rapidly.  

I love that you can add pictures and documents to both of those websites now.  I'm not sure why that makes me feel like they're permanently recorded somewhere.  And who knows?  Maybe that will allow someone else to find their ancestors and add to their little family tree.  Digging through those boxes helped me attach pictures to all those names I keep finding.  

Between scanning stuff and uploading it to both websites, it took me until well after midnight just to get through half the box.  But boy, did I find some cool stuff...

This is Lloyd Leslie Pollett.  He was my paternal grandmother's brother, and the fifth of ten children.  I had heard the names of the other nine siblings mentioned occasionally when I was a child and I had the opportunity to meet a few of them, but this name that I found on a 1920 census from Harrisburg, PA, was unfamiliar to me.  But I added him to the tree.  And then Friday night, while digging through the box, I found this picture.  (His name is written on the back.)  And in another pile, I found this little grey folded program...

Apparently he died when he was 23, although I don't know how.  But with this little record, I was able to add an exact birthdate and death date to that family tree up there.  So, while the rest of the family caught up on the DVR, I was quietly solving little family mysteries upstairs. 

It's a gratifying feeling to put together family connections, and extremely humbling to see how many people came before me and laid the foundation so that I could be exactly where I am today.  I'm so grateful for all of their sacrifice and work, and I'm grateful to know a few of their names.  

So, the boxes still sit tonight, unpurged but a little more familiar.   Maybe someday I'll know what to do with all of this stuff, but for now, it looks like they're going to linger a bit longer.

Granny

This is a picture of my maternal grandmother, Gregoria Bruno Emmert.  Everyone called her Granny.  She is on the left.  I don't know for sure who the other people are, but can only assume based on family stories, that this is a family she worked for in Hawaii as a teenager.    

Granny was born in Puerto Rico, in about 1900 along with a twin sister, Amelia.  Her mother died shortly after her birth, leaving her father to care for two small babies by himself.  He applied for work on the pineapple plantations in Maui and boarded a passenger ship with his two young daughters in about 1904.  Overworked, desperately poor, and unable to care for the twins, he eventually took them to the Salvation Army Home, a local orphanage on the island.  The girls and their father spoke no English and the women at the orphanage spoke no Spanish, so they estimated the girls ages.  One of the women was kind enough to give them her own birthdate since they had no birth certificates or records with original dates.  The girls spent the majority of their childhood in that little orphanage.  

Granny and Amelia were fraternal twins.  My grandmother had very dark skin and Amelia was fair skinned, and unfortunately the prevailing thoughts of the era allowed only Amelia to receive a formal education.  I often heard stories growing up about how my grandmother started working as a housekeeper at a very young age, while Amelia was able to stay in the home and learn to read, write and play an instrument.  My grandmother learned to read late in her life and her writing skills were primarily her signature and a grocery list.  Although my grandmother did not have the opportunities that her sister had, she never spoke with any resentment about her lot in life.  She was only ever grateful for her sister's blessings, and compassionate with the limited understanding of the people in Hawaii in the early 1900s.  She placed a very high value on education, though, and made sure that my mother only attended the best private schools in Hawaii, no matter the cost or sacrifice.  

I was supremely blessed and fortunate to have grown up with my grandmother.  Granny lived with my parents their entire married life, and so when they adopted me in 1970, she became my primary caregiver during the day while they worked.  She was my link to my Hawaiian heritage, my trusted confidant, and my biggest fan.  She celebrated even my most insignificant little victories and listened with interest to every detail of my days.  She planted strawberries and blackberries along the hill below our house in California and picked them each summer and then magically turned them into jam.  She made a lemon meringue pie that no one before or since has ever been able to recreate.  She took me with her every summer to Hawaii because I couldn't bear to have her leave me for three whole months.  And every time I came home from college about, $20 would mysteriously appear in my wallet.  I'm sure there are countless other little things she did for me that I have no memory of.  

I have fond memories of watching Another World after school every day, and then after I endured her "programs," she would endure The Partridge Family and The Brady Bunch with me while she made dinner.  I remember her drinking a glass of Thunderbird every night before bed, and playing Solitaire for hours.  She sewed, cooked, mended, and cleaned.  When she would get frustrated with me, she would slip into a combination of Spanish and Hawaiian that no one else could understand.  

Granny was generous and wise and lived an entire lifetime before me that I only have small details of.  I cannot imagine the depth of her trials and challenges.  But I am so grateful that the road she traveled led her right to my parents' home and therefore right into the center of my life.  I am so grateful to have had the treasure of growing up in a multi generational family.  I think of her nearly everyday, and I wish she had lived long enough to know my children as teenagers and adults.  I think she would be very proud of them.      

Happy Birthday, Granny.  

Indexing

Last month, we had an Indexing Challenge in our ward.  

What is indexing?

Indexing is the process of creating indexes for record collections.  Having indexes allows researchers to more quickly find records for specific individuals; without them, researchers might have to look through hundreds or thousands of records to locate an individual record. 

In FamilySearch indexing, volunteers copy family history information from digital images of documents.  The indexing process is simple.

1. Genealogical documents from around the world are converted into digital images and stored on the FamilySearch system.
2. Each document is divided into small batches of about 20-50 names.
3. An indexer downloads the images to his or her computer and enters the requested information.
4. Each batch of documents is indexed by two different people to ensure accuracy.  We refer to the two indexers as the A indexer and the B indexer.
5. If information from the A indexer does not agree with information from the B indexer, then someone called an arbitrator reviews both versions, compares them with the original document, and makes the needed changes.
6. Everyone gets free access to the indexes at www.familysearch.org.
   
   

The adults competed against the youth to see who could index the most names.  I kind of like a challenge.  I'm slightly competitive.  I had a laptop that was already loaded with the necessary indexing program.  And I'm a pretty fast data enterer.  So even though I had no idea what was a reasonable number of names to expect to finish within a month, I randomly chose 3000.  By the end of August, I had indexed 2900 names.  

The challenge ended with a Ward Ice Cream Social where the winners would be announced and the non-winners would get to be the ice cream servers.  The youth won.  I was fine with that.  The youth should always win stuff like that.  They're awesome.  And I knew they had actually done a lot of work.  But the surprise came when the winners of each auxiliary were also announced.  The EQ winner had indexed 500 names.  The HP winner did 300.  The YM winner was untouchable with 5000 names!  Spell Girl was the winner for the YW and she had done 350.  So, as they got ready to announce the RS winner, I secretly got ready to get up and claim my candy bar and bear my testimony of all the things I had learned during the month of August.  Imagine my shock when another woman's name was announced.  Cathe Becker had indexed 3900 names!  I am completely embarrassed to admit that for a few minutes I was dejected, discouraged, disappointed...and not at all interested in ice cream.  What a brat, huh?  

And I hadn't planned on telling you that whole story until this afternoon when my friend, Renae, posted this on her blog.

"There are many of the sisters whose labors are not known beyond their own dwellings and perhaps not appreciated there, but what difference does that make?  If your labors are acceptable to God, however simple the duties, if faithfully performed, you should never be discouraged."  Eliza R. Snow

Apparently I hadn't learned everything I needed to from last night's experience.  This lesson wasn't just about "checking my pride at the door."  It was about having a better perspective.  And it was about feeling joy and satisfaction "in my labors" even if I don't get a candy bar for doing it.  2900 names is still an amazing accomplishment.  It's 2900 more than I've ever done in my life.  And it doesn't matter if the ward knows how many names I did.  I still did them.  
So after reading that quote this afternoon, here are the things I really learned...

I started the Indexing Challenge because I wanted to win it.  But I kept doing it because it was fascinating.  Looking at names of people who came from Scotland and Italy on a boat in the 1800s with their entire families just to start a new life was inspiring and uplifting.  So many times, I stopped and wondered about those people, and what they had done in the years after arriving in the United States.  

Because I was indexing, I had a greater desire to do my own family history work.  I was drawn to familysearch.org and then to ancestry.com.  And it all ties together.  As I was looking up my own family names, I found census records and passenger lists that looked just like the ones I had indexed.  Only these were names I recognized, and I knew what had happened to them in the years following.   

In the month of August, not only did I index 2900 names of people I am not related to, but I also added hundreds of names to my family tree and took 24 of those to the Dallas Temple.   I'm pretty sure the lasting effects of that satisfaction are better than whatever I would have gotten from the candy bar and five minutes with a microphone.  

Thank you so much, Renae, for helping me realize how grateful I am for my labors, the ones that are noticed and the ones that aren't.  

Daisy and Cloyd

Technically this is a Flashback Tuesday post, but I thought I'd disguise it today.  I've been slightly obsessed with ancestry.com for the past few weeks.   Late last month, I finally gave in and registered for full access to the site.  It's been totally and completely worth it.  I've LOVED getting lost in memories of my relatives.  Last week, I found a census record showing all of my grandmother's nine brothers and sisters. 

amazing, huh?

And then today, I happened to be digging through some boxes and found the mother lode of pictures.  Honestly, I have no idea how there could have been this many pictures in my house that I didn't even know existed.  And nearly all of them have names and dates written on the back!  (also amazing!)

That's my grandmother in the center and 6 of her brothers and sisters.

My grandmother was the youngest, so I didn't get to meet many of her older siblings, but I knew her sister, Gladys, and her brother, Cloyd.  

Uncle Cloyd and his wife, Daisy

Aunt Daisy and my dad

Uncle Cloyd and Aunt Daisy were my favorite.  And I think they must have been my dad's favorite, too, because we visited them a lot.  They lived fairly close to us when we lived in California, so we went there often.  They had a fairly modest home, but the backyard was huge.  It was long and skinny, and Uncle Cloyd had it completely filled with the tidiest, straightest, weedless, raised planter boxes full of vegetables and flowers.  They were high enough off the ground that he didn't even have to bend over to weed or harvest, and there were perfect gravel pathways separating each one.  At the end of the long rows, there was a HUGE greenhouse/garage where he kept his yard tools and starter plants.  I loved looking at all those baby plants, and admiring the meticulous way he took care of them.  I wish I had found a picture of that backyard because it was his pride and joy.  Everytime we came over, he would take us out to look at the vegetables.  I snacked on peas and tomatoes back there, and we always came home with a bag full of something.   

Aunt Daisy was delightful too.  She always wore dresses and a little strand of pearls.  Her hair was white and curly, like a little fluff of cotton on her head. And she wore cute little horn rimmed glasses.  Her bedroom housed all kinds of treasures and when my dad and Cloyd were distracted, she would sneak me back there and give me some beautiful little trinket to take home with me... jewelry or a little jar of lotion, or my favorite...a paper doll book!  (Oh man, I can remember with vivid clarity cutting out those little tabs...this was BEFORE perforated kind...and carefully folding them so that they would fit just perfectly on the doll.  Please tell me you know what paper dolls are...)  

My dad adored Daisy and Cloyd and therefore, I did, too.  I haven't thought about them in years, but all of a sudden, after seeing Cloyd's name on that census, I've had floods of memories come back.  Little reminders of them have been everywhere lately, and I have loved going back to such a happy place in my head.  I am so grateful for the family I grew up with and all the things they did to make my childhood so amazing.