Genealogy Blog Family History

Keep Your Mind on What Matters During the HolidaysPosted by Administrator on November 30th, 2009

With Black Friday looming last week, I spent a significant amount of time surfing through ads, trying to find the very best deals on the presents I would get for my kids and my lovely wife. This inevitably led to scheming about how I would outsmart or outmuscle the early morning crowds to secure the perfect gift. Along the way, I found myself catching glimpses of the things I wanted, too, and hoping that my wife would pick the right one. Before long, I couldn’t even focus on Thanksgiving. I had bigger fish to fry, bigger deals to reel in. Yeah, yeah, being grateful is good and all, but, if I planned things out well enough, I could come home Friday morning with a bounty of the best presents. I would be a hero come Christmas morning, I mused. 

I’ll admit it here and now: I got sucked into all the things about Christmas that don’t matter. And it was ruining my holidays.

Luckily, my wife brought me back down to earth after Thanksgiving dinner in her forthright way. The more I thought about it, the more I realized I was getting caught up in all of this so I could be the best gift-giver around. It had become a form of self-aggrandizement. Also, I was slipping in a few items that I really wanted- and maybe my kids would like them, too. Somehow, I had turned what was supposed to be an act of Christian love and appreciation into an act of selfishness. Funny how we do that sometimes.

So I rethought all my grand gift-giving plans. Like Scrooge and Charlie Bailey before me, I reconsidered what the true meaning of Christmas is. And I made a big attitude adjustment. I would not let the retailers dictate my holiday cheer. Rather, I would make my actions reflective of the Man we celebrate at Christmas. I thought about a neighbor of mine who has been unemployed for several months now and recently lost his car. I thought about others in similar situations. I thought about my wife and what would truly make her happy. And I resolved to do something- something real- to help these people and to somehow lift their burdens.

This is my new mission for the holidays. Anyone can buy a video game. But it takes real Christian love to give a real gift.

Family History Road Trip in Summer 2010?Posted by Administrator on November 25th, 2009

Thanks to last week’s family history blitz, in which we compiled literally hundreds of names from both my Hawaiian and Scottish sides and from my wife’s Scottish side, there is buzz going around about us taking a family history road trip next summer. Ideally, we would rent an RV and hit the road with my siblings and their families some time in July. We would drive straight through Arkansas, Tennessee, and then Virginia. Then we would probably head north into Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Wisconsin before heading back west. Sounds ambitious, I know… and stressful and expensive and completely awesome.

Our longest road trip ever was moving from Utah to Virgina, pulling a small UHaul trailer full of our college stuff with our humble little minivan over the rolling plains of Wyoming, Nebraska, and Iowa and finally climbing through the Appalachians to end up in Alexandria, Virginia. The fan broke on our radiator so we had to stop every few hours to let the engine cool down. We got a flat tire in Cheyenne. Worst of all, we had to listen to our kids’ preschool CD about a billion times to keep them placated. It was a challenge, to say the least. But some thing tells me this would be different.

We ant our family history to be a reality for us and we want to get more names- that’s our main motivation for going. We think that actually going to the places where our ancestors lived, we might unearth some new lines. More importantly, I think it will help our kids connect with their roots.

What do you think? Have you ever done some thing like this?

Family History BlitzPosted by Administrator on November 20th, 2009

 As I mentioned in my last post, our family just came into a huge list of names and dates. And it seems like the subject of compiling everything in one place has been in the air every time my cousins and I get together. People have records here and records there, stuff shoved into shoe boxes or old photo albums. Because we can’t shake the nagging feeling that we need to make an inventory of all the records we have, we are getting together this Saturday for a family history blitz.

This means we’re going to go online and see what we have already. Then we’re going to take all the loose bits of paper and notes on the backs of photos and make sure everything is accounted for. At the end, we’ll know where we’re missing information, where our efforts should placed. 

Has anyone out there ever done this? Did it work? Let me know.