Thoughts on this Sunday Evening

Sunday, May 2, 2010

I have been frantically working on genealogy this week. I have been gathering all these family names, making sure I have enough information to enter them into the church’s New Family Search website and then the monumental task of learning how to use the website. If you want to get on, you will see that Charles Watson Rowntree and Hannah Parks still have more than seven daughters. But at the first of the week they had nine. I was able to lose one, a duplicate. Mysterious Amy is still there. We really don’t know where she came from. I have researched here in New Zealand thinking that she may have belonged to another Rowntree/Rountree/Roundtree/Roantree family, but at this point I can not find an Amy.

Jack and I will go to Hamilton, New Zealand this week to go to the temple. I have wanted to take family names so have been trying to go through the process that is so tenuous and time consuming, but as of tonight, we will do 10 men and 10 women baptisms, seal 12 people to parents and seal 22 spouses together. And what is more fun is that Rachelle and Pepper arrived today and will go with us. Isn’t life just amazing?

We are actually working with four families: Elizabeth’s family, Emily’s family, Esther’s family and Ann Parks‘ (Hannah’s sister) family. It is just the first wave. I will spend my last seven weeks trying to put as many pieces of the puzzle in place as I can. But its that one member of the family I could not get any information on only to find out in New Family Search this person has been done…the only one in her family. Now they will all be together. Or that one son who was not on record anywhere but because I read his father’s will, I know he is the executor. I found out all his work had been done, including his two sons who died at infancy but he was not linked to his family. I will take no names to the temple for him, but he is joined to his family because I spent a few days at Archives New Zealand reading probates and wills.

So as I said my prayers last night, it just kept replaying in my mind that we should not be here. Jack should have died and I should be home dealing with that…and yet we are here. The miracles that seem to follow this process are amazing.
So why are we here in New Zealand. Sister Thompson in the Cashmere Ward says we are here so she has a piano player for her choir. She’s such a wonderful person I can see the Lord doing that. Or could it be a break from life that Jack and Robynn needed. Or is it to finally gather the Findlater family…a family of nine children whose temple names were all there waiting for someone to check the box on the computer…a family married into the Rowntree family that I “found later” after gathering information on spouses. I’m not sure why we are here, but I do know one thing for sure… I am not in charge. There is a higher power involved. So I try to take every opportunity to serve, “because I have been given much.” I love you family. I will let you know how the temple goes.