March 3 - 9 - Sunday to Saturday

Sunday Mar 3

We thought we were through with snow since we are in the month of March but that is not true as others from this area have indicated to us.  We woke up to a beautiful scene outside with snow that had fallen overnight.  The trees really look beautiful.  The snow was mostly gone when we walked back from church at 3pm.

Music and the Spoken Word was beautiful, especially the last song which was “Guide us O Thou Great Jehovah”.  The spoken word subject was “The Best Ships Are Friendships”.  Quoting from the message.  “At the state funeral for former United States President George H. W. Bush in December 2018, former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney ended the eulogy of his dear friend with these words “There are wooden ships, there are sailing ships, there are ships that sail the sea.  But the best ship are friendships, and may they always be””.

We enjoyed dinner with mom and dad Senior. We were going to call them to see if we could visit them and before we could, they called and invited us over for dinner of roast beef, potatoes, carrots and onions and a salad.  We watched “When Calls the Heart” on the Hallmark Channel and then played a game of Five Crowns.  Had lemon cake and ice cream for dessert.

Monday March 4

We attended the Mission devotional and enjoyed the singing and messages.  The meeting went a little long, so we had to hurry back to the apartment for our breakfast appointment. We enjoyed breakfast at Denny’s with Bruce and Robin Goldthorpe at 9am and visited with them until around noon.  It was great to see them and catch up on what was going on with them.  They are our long-time neighbors and he is our current Bishop.  

They shared what happened with the car accident when former ward members, the Ransdell’s, were killed.  They were traveling north on Country Club Way and stopped at the stoplight.  When the light turned green and as they turned left to go west on Southern, a car sped through the red light and broadsided their car and they were both killed instantly.  A friend of ours Chad Sampson and his 11-year-old son were right behind them and saw the accident.

We enjoyed a game night with treats with our MTC group.  We played two fun games.  The first was the story game when each person continues with a story going around a circle.  The second was where each person wrote five names of famous people and we divided into two teams guessing the names.  The first round, you had 30 seconds to guess as many names as possible and could say anything as a clue but the name.  The second round was saying only one word but once you said the one word you were stuck so you had to choose each word carefully.  The third round was actions and no speaking.  The second and third rounds were easier as you were repeating the names in most cases. 

Tuesday March 5

Soon after I got to the library, I noticed two women who were both looking at one computer screen.  I stopped and looked at what they were trying to do and asked them if they needed help and they said yes.  They were a mother and daughter from Wisconsin.  The daughter was in town for a conference and she was running the computer while the mother was watched.  We set up an account and with the mother’s knowledge of the family, we started building the tree.  We worked on mother’s side of the family.  She knew a lot about her father whose name was Henry Aebly.  It took some work but we were able to connect to grandparents already on the tree and found her parents and added her siblings.  Ancestry.com helped us find the 1910, 1920 and 1930 census records.  The names on the 1910 census were spelled with the family name but the other census records had a spelling of Abbley and Abbler.  We added names using these two census records and made good progress with their tree.  I was supposed to conduct the 9:30am prayer meeting but by the time I realized, the time had passed while helping these two. All I could do was apologize to Elder Stott as he conducted the meeting for me.

I helped Don Attridge print out some temple names for Initiatory and Sealings as he was going to the Salt Lake Temple.  I help him regularly and he gave me a new hand painted two-part Christmas card which is shown below

I visited briefly with Brother David Krueger from Oklahoma who was here a month or so ago and I helped him then.  He had been at RootsTech 2019 last week.  He had a few questions about the Temple list on his Family Search account.  I talked to him several more times during the day and talked to him and answered questions every day this week until Friday evening as he left for home early on Saturday.

Helped several missionaries who have not yet assisted individuals get started on FamilySearch.  I showed them my presentation which shows them how to set up a FamilySearch account.  They understood and thanked me for helping them.  I like to spend some time on a regular basis helping to teach the new missionaries.

I noticed a man had printed out some 11x17 documents and stopped to help him. I showed him how we could print out a better version of the certificate that he had printed.  His name is Frank Henry Cutler III and is from Salt Lake City.  I helped him for about 15 minutes and showed him some of the things that he could do with memories and how to collaborate with others. Someone had put three pictures of his grandfather when he served a mission in the Southern States around 1898.

Wednesday March 6

I led the prayer meeting at 7:30am and used a little humor to explain the new method we are using to make sure missionaries have equal opportunities to help guests.  I showed the short video with Patricia Heaton that I shared from last week’s blog Patricia Heaton Presentation

Helped a church member, Marye, from Washington State. She is a Ward Temple and Family History consultant and a temple worker (probably in her late 70’s or early 80’s). I asked her what she wanted to learn and how much time she had to spent.  She indicated she wanted to learn about using the Memories function on FamilyTree and about the notices she receives for reserving names for temple work and had two hours to spend at the library.  She had photos on her iPhone, IPAD and on a flash drive.  I showed her how to add photos from her IPAD and then how to tag the people in the photos.  We updated the portrait for one of her grandparents.  I really enjoyed helping her learn about Memories.  She has a lot of work to do but now knows how to do it.  We looked at one of the messages that we had received about reserving temple work but it had expired but another name was suggested.  The individual’s first name was Noah and we looked at the record which indicated Noah was female.  We looked at the source which was a birth record indicating female and then looked at the image and saw the person who indexed the record was mistaken and Noah was male.  She changed the sex and reserved his temple work.  As I finished helping her, I noticed we had spent two hours and her next stop was going to the Salt Lake Temple.

Helped Donna who is with a group of women from Texas who visit the library every year (The Texas Tracers). She needed help with a possible error in FamilyTree with the daughter connected to the wrong family.  We verified the she, her husband and descendants were correct.  She needs to do more checking before corrections can be made.  We spent time on Friday and were able to make the changes.

Here is an incredible story about what DNA testing can reveal as I talked to a man who shared what happened to his wife.  She was born in Fresno, California in 1948 and he was born in 1944. Last July she was contacted by a man who said that she was his sister based on their DNA.  They continued to correspond to try to figure out what was going on.  The brother compared his sister’s DNA with the wife’s brother’s DNA and they matched and visa versa.  The two women were both born in Fresno but on different days but only several hours apart (one before midnight and one after).  The only explanation is that these two women were accidentally switched at birth and grew up with parents who were not their birth parents.  The story has a happy ending as both families have met and they all now have more family.  The woman who was at the library with her husband told me that when she saw a picture of her biological mother, she couldn’t believe how much she looked like her.  In her family growing up she only had one sibling (a brother) and her brown hair didn’t conflict with her parents so there was no reason to suspect a problem.  I now understand why hospitals are so careful making sure that babies are matched with their mothers.  I am sure this happened before.

Went to the temple.  We were on the same Endowment session with the Bakers who are missionaries on our floor waiting for visas to go to Vietnam. After the session we went to dinner at Chubby’s Mexican Restaurant which is in Rose Park.

Thursday March 7

We had a relaxing day as today is our day when we don’t go to work until 6pm.  I read most of the book about Saroo Brierly, a keynote speaker at RootsTech.  I completed it on Friday.  

You can read more about his experience at the end of this blog entry.  When Saroo was five years old, he and his brother went to the train station in his small town and got separated.  He boarded a train which ended up taking him thousands of miles all the way across India to Calcutta where he miraculously survived for more than two weeks by himself.  He ended up in an orphanage and was eventually adopted by a couple from Australia.  His adoptive parents encouraged him to remember his roots and he drew pictures of what he remembered of his hometown.  In his 20’s he searched off and on using Google Earth to try to find a place in India which matched his memory and after five years he finally found his home.  He returned to India and met his mother who had never left her home in hopes that her son would return someday which he did.

I spent time helping the group from Texas called the Texas Tracers based in Victoria, Texas.  One woman, Betty, had an email from the Discovery floor that showed a Mayflower relative but it was a cousin and not a direct ancestor.   I showed her Relativefinder.org and she found a direct Mayflower ancestor.  It was fun showing her how she is related to other famous people.

Sister Tolman helped a woman named Michelle for several hours and was able to help her learn more about FamilyTree and Memories.  They connected and enjoyed working together.  Here is a picture.

Friday March 8

Went to the doctor’s office early for blood work.  Sister Tolman went food shopping and I went to the Library as I had a couple of things to do but ended up spending more than two hours there.  I reviewed my training with Elder Anderson and got some good input from him.  Ended up helping sa new missionary couple as they helped two guests.  We ended up finding a lot of information even though one of them hadn't brought a lot of information about his family. 

We started at the library at 12:30pm as normal for Friday. Helped Donna straighten out a family where one daughter (her ancestor) belonged to another family.  We found both families on the 1850 census and then were able to document the two different families.  We put her ancestor with the correct parents.  While making these corrections we found and resolved a lot of duplicates and also found the possible mother of the family as the 1850 census for her ancestor only had the father who was widowed but remarried in the 1850’s. This gave her some good information as a starting point to find records to confirm the first wife's identity.

It started really snowing around 3 or 4pm and it was really snowing when we walked home at 5pm.  See a picture of Sister Tolman with all the snow on her jacket.

You can see how hard it was snowing at about 5pm

When we got back to the library after dinner, I continued helping the group from Texas with various minor problems.  Toward the end of the day, I showed them the compare-a-face on FamilySearch and now they plan to get some pictures loaded on FamilyTree so they can try the same thing.  You can access the feature on familysearch.org/discovery.  See some results below.

Betty from the Texas Tracers has a cousin Susan who lives in West Jordan.  It turns out Susan served a mission in France and Belgium in the early 1970’s.  We were able to talk some French back and born and that was fun.  After Susan left Betty noticed that she left her cell phone in the library.  Betty said that she would call her and I said it wouldn’t do any good because we had her phone.  Fortunately she had her home phone and called her husband.  When Susan got home, her husband told her about the phone and she hadn’t missed it and came back to the library on Saturday morning to get her phone.

Saturday March 9

We did out Saturday cleaning this morning and went to the library to start our 1pm shift. 

Helped Hugh Anderson from Oregon.  I helped him identify areas to update his tree by adding birth country information and added some Scottish relatives for him.  His ancestor James Jolly was born in Scotland in 1884 and I managed to find him on the 1901 Scotland census and add this source to the tree.  I helped him fill out his fan chart as he wanted to print the large charts for him, his wife, and his three sons.  He came upstairs later and thanked me for my help.

Sister Tolman helped Elder Hill who lives in the apartment right above us with scanning. While she was helping him, several other individuals asked her to help them as well.  This is an area of expertise for her.

I helped a husband and wife, Jimmy and Robin from Oregon, get started on their family trees.  We found Robin’s parents on the tree and showed many ancestors but just got started with Jimmy.  They will continue to learn more when they get home as we found a Family History Center near them.

I helped the women from the Texas Tracers for several hours with a variety of Family History tasks including identifying adoptive and biological parents, merging records, etc.  They are expert researchers but need some help with how to use FamilyTree.

I helped the Parks who are missionaries on our floor.  They had scanned some photos tonight and we tagged her mother and sisters in one of the photos and updated her mother’s portrait.

Saroo Brierley – Miracles Can Happen

At the age of five, Saroo Brierley found himself alone at a train station in his home country of India. It had been late in the evening when his brother, Guddu, had left him to rest on a platform bench, promising to return soon. When Brierley woke, what could have been hours later, Guddu was nowhere to be found. Dazed and groggy from sleep, Brierley boarded the train in front of him with the hope of finding his brother. Little did he know, he would never see Guddu again.

The train took Brierley thousands of miles from his home, his mother, and his siblings. When he disembarked, he found himself in a busy rail station in Calcutta surrounded by throngs of commuting people who didn’t speak his native Hindi language and who didn’t seem to notice the small frightened boy in their midst.

As Brierley retold his story for attendees, he described what it was like being lost as a five-year-old and falling to his knees in despair. But he also spoke about the courage it takes to keep going. “The great thing about human beings is that when we do fall on our knees, we let everything out, shed everything out, and we learn to pick ourselves back up,” he said.

When he got back up from his knees he determined to keep boarding trains again and again until he found his way back home. Again and again he found himself back in Calcutta. After weeks, he found the courage to walk away from the station into the unknown city.

Brierley described almost drowning two different times in nearby rivers and narrowly missing being taken as a prisoner by people with ulterior motives. Eventually, he befriended a teenage boy that took him to the police. In the hands of the authorities, Brierley was locked up for two days before being sent to a youth juvenile prison. In time the decision was made to place an ad in the Calcutta papers to see if anyone would come forward to claim him. When nobody did, Brierley was taken to the Indian Society for Sponsorship and Adoption. Those operating the society gave him the option to stay or to choose to be adopted by a new family. After weighing his options, Brierley chose adoption.

His adoptive parents, Sue and John Brierley met him for the first time at an airport in Australia and raised him as their own in Hobart, Tazmania. He grew up experiencing the Australian way of life, the culture, the food, and the language. Speaking of his relationship with his adoptive parents he said, “My parents were amazing people and I have such gratitude towards them.” He described his mother’s love for India, the food, spirituality, and culture, and praised his father as an “amazing businessman.”

When Brierley reached his early twenties his curiosity about his Indian roots began to grow. He described the feeling as a “massive void that had been sitting there for such a long time.” The curiosity of the void became stronger and stronger and continually occupied his thoughts.

When the remarkable technology of Google Earth was released, Brierley found himself entertaining the idea of finding the rail station he remembered from so long ago, the one he’d gone to with Guddu. Having a solid map in his head of the station, a nearby water tower, a ravine and a bridge, he began his search. “I know what I was looking for,” he said. At times it seemed futile and after five years of searching he sometimes considered giving up. But one night, he found it. Using a drawing he’d made as a child, he compared it to what he was seeing on Google Earth. He was certain he’d found the right place. After sharing his discovery with his adoptive parents and getting their blessing, he planned a trip India.

Once Brierley was actually standing in the station he experienced what he could only describe as muscle memory. His legs knew the way home. After thirty minutes he found himself reunited with his birth mother. He called this “such a pivotal moment, a moment I thought I would never achieve, a moment where, you could say, that two souls rested, from my mom to myself.”

Soon thereafter, the local policemen alerted the media to Brierley’s story, and before long he was being contacted for interviews. The miracle of his reunion story began to be known far and wide. Brierley decided to write his story, a book he entitled A Long Way Home and in November of 2016 the award-winning movie, Lion, depicting his story was released.

One of the most touching moments from Brierley’s address came with the video he shared of his two mothers meeting for the first time, a wish his adoptive mother had expressed for years come true. Of this tender introduction Brierley said, “I am so privileged to now have two mothers, a mother that gave me birth, to a mother that gave me a second chance in life.”

Brierley closed with the following words: “What is the success of my story and how did I do it? The massive love for my parents, my sister, my brothers, the fusion of integral elements of hope, determination, sheer grit, being fierce, is how I managed to do what I did

You can view his presentation at this link