#52Ancestors Week 9 Where There's a Will...

Where There’s a Will…
     As a Genealogist you might suspect that I’d talk about Wills and Probate records. You’d be wrong. My humble farmer ancestors almost always left no wills, but of course where they did, I was grateful.

Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way

     This is probably the second most common thought that might pop into someone’s mind when finishing that first phrase.
     I’ve been reading 1 Nephi in the Book of Mormon and young Nephi and his older brothers are sent by their father to go back to Jerusalem and get the records and genealogies of their ancestors from a cousin who is a truly wicked and evil man. After a couple of tries by the older brothers, they were going to give up but Nephi said, “I will go and do the things which the Lord hath commanded, for I know that the Lord giveth no commandments unto the children of men, save he shall prepare away for them that they may accomplish the things which he commandeth them.”
     The Lord then commanded Nephi to go back to the house of his cousin and being led by the spirit, “not knowing beforehand the things which” he should do, he discovered a drunken Laban, his cousin. Long story short, he was commanded to slay Laban. Why? Well it has to do with why record keeping, scriptures and genealogy are so important: “It is better that one man should perish than that a nation should dwindle and perish in unbelief.” (1 Ne 4:13)
     This is exactly what happened to other groups that set forth into the world without records, like the Jaredites and Mulekites who immigrated to the Americas before the time of Christ. Their descendants did record their stories on stone, but to this day no one can read them perfectly thus don’t know their stories.

Legal Stuff like Laws and Wills 

     Listening to a panel of BYU professors discussing this story of Nephi slaying Laban a question was answered for me. It had to do with a Hebrew law that permits, no actually makes it imperative, to punish by death a person who lies, then steals, then bears false witness before others. Like I said, Laban was a truly wicked man who stole Nephi’s family riches, and took away their father Lehi’s good name, and accused them falsely of being thieves and robbers. Nephi was thus legally in the right and had the moral authority to carry out a sentence of death. How horrible it must have been to be asked to cut off a cousin’s head with that man’s own sword.
     In our day, a will is the legal document that protects the family and descendant’s rights, and it must be testified to all along the legal process. This helps us as genealogists in finding the legal heirs.

Doing A Difficult Thing

     I wonder how often we’ve been asked to do difficult things and had the faith to go ahead and do it. Such was the Field’s family move to Mexico. We had prayed about it and knew that it was right for all of us. Then we set about the legal process to make it happen: getting the right visas, setting up a bank account with direct deposit, got a debit card we could use to withdraw money to pay bills in another country, prepared our household goods for either storage or shipment, selected the records we would need to take with us (in my case, genealogical records that I was working on), and got a P.O. Box that forwarded mail down to Guadalajara. Yes, it was a hard thing to do, but we persevered and it was a grand experience. I will continue telling that story here on my blog from time to time.

Gratitude to Amy and her #52Ancestors Prompts

     I’m grateful for the weekly prompts from Amy Johnson Crow in her #52Ancestors for 52 weeks to get me posting each week. Sometimes it will be personal history recorded and sometimes stories of my ancestors; other times it will be stories about our living in Mexico, the land where many people suppose that some of the Book of Mormon stories take place.

Why Didn't I Buy Heirlooms in Mexico?

Heirlooms and I

     The past six months have found me moving from one house to a smaller one. I was the end of line repository for my husband's family and my family heirlooms. Handling each one I needed to make a decision of what to keep. My Millenial daughter said, "Just get rid of all that stuff, mom."

Living in Mexico from 1995 to 2001

     I have been tying my blog into my family's story of living in Mexico. For this poignant story about heirlooms it wasn't hard to find something to think about or write about. We unexpectedly returned to the United States and when we finally settled and unpacked in Arizona, I realized that although I'd purchased many, many beautiful handcrafted gifts for others, I'd never bought one thing for our own family and now it was too late. All I have are photos, no objects. Yet this was a significant period in our family's life. NO HEIRLOOMS for the future. We don't think about the fact that we are creating the heirlooms for our grandchildren.

The Story of the Symbolic Quilt 

     Last fall I realized that I had several handmade quilts that are never used in Arizona's climate, so I decided to send them to my daughter who now resides in Michigan because I know she could really use them. One however became quite a symbol for heirlooms in our day and age.
     My grandmother had made this certain quilt in red, white and blue. I loved it. It was patriotic. It was made from seed or flour sacks. But it had a history. When a stepson was about 11 years of age, he was about to get caught reading in bed under the covers of the lower bunk bed late one night. He tossed his lamp, still lit, under "my" quilt on the top bunk bed and forgot about it. It smoldered all night long. A hole was created in it.
     Because I loved that quilt so much and it was the last thing my grandmother gave me before she died, I was devastated. Over the years I tried to find a seamstress or quilter who could repair it. I'd even tried to find matching fabrics for this purpose over the years. Alas, no one could tell me how to repair it or do it themselves until last fall. A friend decided we should try to salvage it by patching it and then I could send it to my daughter in Michigan. When the patch was finished and it told it's own story, we washed the quilt one last time on gentle cycle to see how it would do. It fell apart.

So the Story has Another Twist

    The materials used to create it couldn't withstand the repairs that had stronger threads. Now it sits in a closet awaiting a wall mounting, because it can never be used as a quilt again cuddling my grandchildren in harsh Michigan winters. Now only I will see it when I go into a room I seldom use. Only I appreciate it's history and story.
     The beloved heirloom was made from free easily found materials that were unable to withstand the test of time, it was treated negligently, it's burnt hole was after many years unfixable. Now the quilt stands as a symbol of all heirlooms who were made with love from perishable materials, then treated with indifference, put into attics, packed away until an "Antiques Roadshow" moment, left unloved under the bed or in a long forgotten box only to be remembered too late. Oh, let us not procrastinate taking care to create quality heirlooms for the future and preserve the ones we have inherited with care.

Valentine's Day

Valentines Come in Various Forms

and at Various Times in Our Lives

  The word Valentine brings back many memories. My First Valentine was in first grade at Pasadena Town and Country School. The teacher took this cute picture of Downing Cless and me having a hug. He became a Professor in New York in the theater arts dept. (I asked his permission to share this publicly, by the way)

Here is what we look like 60 years later

     My favorite Valentine Photo is the one of my sweet husband, Bob Field, and I on our wedding day the 23rd of August 1979 in the Washington D.C. temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

     Now, fittingly enough, since my former sweethearts are not longer in my life, I have another love. Yes, I know this is shocking. But here I am at a place I love, doing what I love...and for all my ancestors that I love. #52Ancestors

Bev at the Family History Center

Favorite Names

#52Ancestors

Week 6 Favorite Name

     The topic of names is one of my favorites. I wrote a whole blog post early on about the meaning of names.

https://beeinthedesert.blogspot.com/2012/01/meaning-of-name.html

Place Names

     I’ve been reading in the Book of Mormon where Lehi names a river after his oldest son, and a valley after his second oldest son, and when Ishmael the father of another family dies, he names the place Nahom which means in Hebrew “consolation” from the verb naham, “be sorry, console oneself.” Another place was named Shazer meaning twisting, intertwining.

My Family Favorite Names

     So with this fascination for names how can I pick one? My grandmother is Rosa Etta Sarepta Hicks Utterback, her brother was Elijah Japeth Shannon Hicks. This last one for years sent me on a wild goose chase thinking Shannon was the maiden surname of his grandmother. It wasn’t. So, never guess and suppose something. Always get the proof. My friend’s uncle has a middle name of Fields and he’s never found another Field in his genealogy. I knew a childhood friend named Drake. He was named after the doctor that delivered him. So you just never know.

Add Foreign Names for Hilarity

     When we lived in Guadalajara, Mexico our first house was on a street named J. J. Martinez Aguirre. It is pronounced in Spanish which sounds like “hota hota Martinez Aquirrrrrr A.” I loved the way this felt in my mouth, so it was fun to tell people where we lived in Chapalita. It was a beautiful home with windows that opened like French doors filled with small beveled panes of glass that cast rainbows on the walls when the sun would shine through. My husband Bob had a favorite road name he liked. He would see it when he would drive from Little Rock, Arkansas to Jackson, Mississippi. It was called Fortification Road. Being the foreign language Geek that he was, he’d always think of this word with an Irish ??? accent and it came out, “Fartification Road” and he’d chuckle every time.

I guess adding a foreign language to a favorite names list can really be interesting.

IN THE CENSUS

#52Ancestors  

The week five challenge of #52 Ancestors is "In The Census."     

     We lived in Guadalajara, Mexico through 2000, when a census taker came around to our house. Yes, even Mexico has a Census. My husband didn’t want to answer their questions due to his concerns over privacy and living in a foreign country with only a legal tourist visa. However, as a genealogist who has found census records invaluable in my own research, I insisted we answer their questions.

        Then in 2010, I worked for the U.S. Census as a quality control clerk in the local office which was over the county and surrounding towns not included in the Metropolitan Tucson area. This included Native American/Indian Reservations. One of the things I learned was that the government, is not well enough organized to use census information gathered to use “against” its citizens. With the improvements in GPS global tracking, this may well not be the case in 2020. The only people our census takers went to in person were those who did not fill out their questionnaire and return them. If you don’t want to be bothered in person, just mail it in! Only one randomly selected person out of 100 was asked more extensive questions as a sample for income, etc. This started in earlier census years like 1940, where whoever appeared in the two lines bold marked on preprinted census record sheets were asked additional questions and their answers appeared at the bottom of that page.

      Now to answer your question…”Was reading the 2010 census takers handwriting easier?” No Even though they printed and didn’t us cursive, the computer often couldn’t read their letters and numbers, because Optical Character Recognition software was still in its early stages and even with lessons on how to form each character, the people didn’t write them correctly! LOL

     I may go ahead and post here each week even though it may not be about my move to Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico and our life there until 2001, but it seems that I am not blogging like I should and this may be just the motivation I need to keep posting here. No one reads it or follows or comments, so it will be fun to see if someone actually does come to see this through #52Ancestors.