Week of January 15, 2017

Sunday Pres. Tate presented our reading program for the next 13 weeks. It focuses on learning about Christ and is called Christ in You. It includes reading in the New Testament, Jesus the Christ, some selected articles, and listening to good music. We are encouraged not to read intellectually, but to read with the Spirit with the intent to be uplifted and have our testimonies strengthened. The program concludes on Easter Sunday, April 16. I’m looking forward to it.

Monday was a holiday so I spent the day catching up on things in the apartment. In the afternoon we had a pot luck with our zone at Sister Kay’s home. I really enjoy this group of missionaries and I am grateful for the opportunity to work with them and learn from them. Stokes complete their mission the end of this month and two of the group had birthdays so it was fun to be together.

Training Zone B off-duty

Tuesday we started our Capstone classes. The classes went well and Ted did a good job teaching. We finished in time to get to the 12:00 session at the temple, so Ted and I hurried over to find the doors locked. Apparently, the temple is closed for two weeks for cleaning and we were the only ones that didn’t know about it. It was a really strange feeling to be locked out of the temple.

Wednesday after classes I worked at the library for a few hours and got quite a bit done. In the evening I reviewed for my class tomorrow and reviewed my family history notes to see what more needs to be done to clean up some of the records I have. I was really excited to get things organized again, but there is more that need to be done than I had hoped.

Thursday I taught the class on Partners and really enjoyed it. This is a good group, so there was a good amount of participation. I had a couple of people tell me they really appreciated the information. After class I worked at the library to clean up some of the sheets I had. On one I found what appears to be an error on the part of the priest in his reference to a lady in the record. He referred to an entry on a page that refers to someone with her same name, but she is 30 years older than the date on the marriage record. I asked a lady for help and we looked at several things but couldn’t find any record of the family. I couldn’t find the birth record for two of the children I knew about. I did a search in familysearch.org and found 4 more children with birth, marriage, and death records for most and census records for all after they immigrated to the United States. I could not find a death record for the father. I now need to go into the records and clean them up, then go back to Sweden and see what I have there. I must have some record I’m forgetting because I have the husband’s date of birth and the birth dates of the first two children. I also had the emigration date so I need to go back to the family and find where I got the information from.

Friday we stopped between the two classes we were teaching to watch the inauguration address for Pres. Donald Trump. I’m sure he didn’t make his predecessor happy, but I really hope he is able to do the things he said he wanted to do. The big thrust is to put America first instead of everyone else in the world and to restore America’s soundness and greatness. I really hope and pray he can be successful.

I taught attaching external sources. I think it went well. It can be fairly complex, but the class stayed with me for the most part. There were a few system glitches as we went through the processes, but I think it went ok in the end. I spent the afternoon at the library and was able to find most of the records for the family I worked on yesterday. I’m not sure what the difference was in the searching that I did today because I found the information and records right where they should have been when I look before.

The day of the Snow

Saturday we woke up to about 6 inches of snow with more falling heavily. The elders were out shoveling the walks. We finally got our books for the mission reading program Friday, so I was able to read in the book and highlight the things I wanted to. It works better than reading online. They didn’t get enough from the printer when the program was introduced so we have been waiting. It snowed most of the day so I was grateful we didn’t have to go anywhere. I did some more work on the family I’d found the last couple of days. There is so much that needs to be done.

Snow at Garden Apartments