I Am So Thankful For My Ancestors

I had an interesting experience at the FHC yesterday. It was after teaching my PAF class and only an hour or so before closing. A young woman had come in stating she needed to make a Family Tree for a class that she and her husband are taking in preparation for becoming foster parents. She brought her own birth certificate and her mother’s death certificate. Her mother was born the same year I was, 1943 and her sire was born in 1936. (I say sire because she never met him; he is her birth father but that is all. Her mother never married him but married two or three other men.) They died 1998 and 2008 respectively. We were able to find them on the Social Security Death Index and therefore obtained their correct birth and death dates. That is all we were able to find. The young woman’s grandmother is still alive but not in good health. I believe the young woman stated her grandmother has Alzheimer’s. All we could come up with was herself, her mother and her grandmother. We looked on many different sites. The US census would have been a good source, except the last available one is the 1930 census. It was hard for me to imagine that that was all one could know about her ancestors. I compared it to my own life where my great-grandchildren have two great-great grandmothers still living. That is five living generations! It made me realize, again, just how blessed I am to know about my ancestors and many of their stories and experiences they experienced while on this earth. I am so thankful for my ancestors and the lives they lived and trials they endured so that I could be where I am today, living in the United States of America and be a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. If just one of them had lived their life differently, who’s to say where I would be this day.