A Sacred Preparation: Our Loved Ones...

...but not our darling grandchildren. That is another issue entirely.

These loved ones that require our attention, our Sacred Preparation, are our ancestors.

Back when I was 11 or so I began to care passionately about my ancestors. No one around me was particularly interested, though I did gather some names and possible dates and locations.

When I reached a deadend, I turned to the Royal Family of Britain and read everything about their history, back to King George III of American Revolution fame, that I could find. This included hordes of cousins from throughout Europe.

I had only a few cousins of my own - that I knew of.

My father was an only child, and my mother had two sisters. One had two children, the other six. Those were the cousins we knew about. They lived about 80 miles away for most of my growing up.

But I wanted to know who had come before.

I still do. But now it's a sacred trust. Just as we were making a full commitment to get ready for our mission - only a month or two ago - it came to us that one of the preparations that was required of us was to get our ancestors' names in order and take them to the temple.

We have a son w/ two early-teen daughters who are willing to go do the baptisms. Now we just need to prepare the names.

As we were having these thoughts, it was announced that the church was changing its system, simplifying the submission of names. Perfect timing! Our task then became to make sure our records were as accurate and complete as possible. I began to spend most of Sunday working on this project.

The day came for the switch-over to the new system, Feb 5. We signed up. Turns out that because our records are for one area but we live temporarily in another, we knew about the switch-over but weren't eligible for it yet. Phooey!

So we have missed taking our ancestors' names to the temple when we expected to be able to. Still we learned a fair amount - and still we have huge gaps.

I still consider it one of our steps of preparing for our mission, a sacred trust and obligation. I hope the new system will be available here soon. Meanwhile, we'll keep searching... PL