Sweet Selfie!

I love this handsome guy!  Thanks Christian for brightening up my morning with your "selfie."  A year ago I spent three months in Gilbert when Amy was on bed rest waiting for Eden to come. While I was trying to take care of Amy, Christian was taking care of me in many ways.  What a sweet son-in-law I have been blessed with.  Thanks for the trips to Dairy Queen when I needed a little something extra!

Missionary Moments #12 November 23, 2014

Another week has sped by.  We are making great progress at work and now we are accomplishing our goal each day.  We started with 24 boxes of unopened probate files and we have three boxes to go.  Now don't get excited because that just means we are going to get another set of boxes to work on.  But we are getting the job done!  It is fun to see the names on the files and sometimes when it is a name I know I start thinking about someone I know with that name.  One name in particular for me was Blake.  There were a lot of Blakes around this area in the 1800s.  Most of you know we named Ben after Benton Blake who was my bishop when I was in high school.  I admired him so much.  He was also a lawyer and many of the people I have worked on named Blake were lawyers as well.  I think that is so interesting.  Anyway we are both learning how to add a little interest to what we are doing.  One of our co-workers is leaving to go work at the capital building doing research for the legislators so they had a little going away luncheon for him.  It was nice to be included in the celebration.

Yesterday we had a nice p-day visiting Plymouth, Massachusetts--the home of the first Thanksgiving. (Check the blog in a few days for pictures)  We went to Plimoth Plantation where we enjoyed visiting a Native American village and then a 17th century English village.  They had people dressed in period costumes and if you asked questions they would answer you with information pertinent to that time period. The Indians didn't use their native language (needless to say) but the people in the English Village all had English accents.  The houses were dark and smokey, the tools and utensils were primitive, but life went on. The Indians slept on deer hides and kept the cold out with hides hanging on the entrances of their homes. They had a fire in the middle of each structure with a hole in the ceiling so the smoke could escape.  They dealt with extreme weather, starvation often on the horizon, illnesses that could kill many of them.  Two cultures came together with neither of them trusting the others but eventually their survival depended on each other.  The goal for all of them was to just survive.  And survive they did.  How can we not be proud of our wonderful heritage?

Missionary Moments #12--Part 2

Today we attended Stake Conference.  What a great meeting.  One of the speakers was a young father.  He told us he came from extremely humble beginnings in Brazil.  His mother died when he was one year old and from that point on his father could no longer function and wasn't able to work.  They lived in the slums of Brazil.  He said as a young boy he noticed some things about several men who helped their family.  They were members of the LDS Church, they had all served missions, and they had gone to America and got MBAs. He decided he would do everything he could to be just like them.  He joined the church when he was 14 and from that time on he made a goal to some day earn his MBA in America.  He served his mission, got a degree in Brazil and now he is attending Dartmouth to earn his MBA.  Brazil will be so blessed when he gets back!  He bore his testimony that good examples and the gospel changed his life and we were able to see that it had. Anyway, today was another great day.  We hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving.  We will be thinking of each of you.

Labels

When we prep the documents for the camera I don't have a lot of time to look at what they are.  This week I did pick up a pretty good sized probate file and thought that this must be someone who had a substantial estate.  As it turned out, it was actually commitment papers to the insane asylum.  I will be sharing more about what are in probate files in a later post.  As I started opening various documents in the file I kept seeing insane, insane, insane on everything.  I was thinking at the time, "was he really insane?" or had other issues, or someone who wanted to get him out of the way.  I know these thoughts are probably a little dramatic but I don't think history will always look at asylums in a good light  during the earlier periods of time, nor the admitting requirements. One of the last documents I picked up was a handwritten request.  It was a letter written by a brother of the patient a number of years after he had been committed.  The gist of the letter was that the brother requested that his brother have the label of "insane" removed from his record. He stated his brother was not insane he just wasn't capable of taking care of himself.  I don't know if this was an older or younger brother but apparently he was old enough to get involved in his brothers case.  I know I was proud of this stranger who cared about his brother and wanted people to know who he really was and what his abilities were.  I guess coming from an education background I am sensitive to the shift in parents who use to fight us when we dealt with special needs of a child because they didn't want the stigma associated with certain words.  Then I saw a shift when we began dealing with parents who came in demanding that their child be labeled ADHD or autistic, or some other issue.  I have thought after reading the request of a brother if some of our so easily labeled children will have someone do that for them.

Why Grandpas and Grandmas Should go on a Mission!

There are so many good reasons to serve a mission.  But one of the exciting reasons is the wonderful pictures, cards, letters, emails, and poems you get from your grandkids.  When I decorated the wall by our kitchen table I anticipated being able to pin up all the cute things that the grandkids would send us.  The wall is getting full and sweet words and pictures keep coming.  This morning when we checked the mail we had such a cute picture from Peter and an amazing poem from Ava.  What a great way to start the week!
I want to thank the parents of our amazing grandkids who have encouraged them to keep in touch and for taking the time to keep us updated on what is going on in their families.  We are truly blessed. Being home with the grandkids is great and I can't wait to see them all again.  But I wouldn't give up the opportunities we are having to serve here in New Hampshire especially knowing we have wonderful family back home just cheering us on.  I hope you all enjoy Ava's cute poem.  It is now on my wall so I can see it every day.

Missionary Moments #11, November 16, 2014

Grandma said it is my turn to do "Missionary Moments!"  On Tuesday we took another trip into the nether parts of Massachusetts.  We wanted to see the John F. Kennedy library in Boston, which was on the big bay between the city and Cape Cod.  After we figured out how to get there, we went into a very impressive building, with a giant flag.  We have been to several presidential libraries before, but I think this was one of my favorites.  I didn't remember how good JFK was as a writer, and several of his speeches were loaded with good references to God and religious principles.  Check it out at the library if you are interested in what he said.  There was also a section in the library about the Cuban Missile Crisis, which almost put us into a nuclear war with the Russians.  Also worth learning more about.  

From Boston we drove to Salem.  We were interested in our family connections to the Salem witch trials.  There are a lot of creepy stores and museums in downtown Salem, and a few cemeteries, but we were glad that Halloween was over.  There were many people still decked out in witch-oriented costumes.  We found a nice museum that showed us a well-done movie about immigration to the Salem area and the witch trials.  You can see more about the story on Grandma's blog.

We are loving our mission.  We had set a goals to take 1,500 pictures a day but were having trouble getting that many done.  We decided that maybe we could only do that about twice a week.  On Monday we did over 1,700 pictures and then Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday we did over 1,500 capture each day.  Hooray!  We can do this because we are working together and being blessed because we are serving the Lord.  Last night we got a knock on our door at 7:30.  It was one of our missionaries.  His companion was really sick and he wanted to know if we had a thermometer.  We didn't but we told him we would go get one.  We went to the Rite Aid up the road from us and got him some medicine, a thermometer, saltine crackers, ginger sale, Seven-up, and some Gator aid.  When we got back I changed into my Sunday clothes and the Elder and I gave his companion a blessing.  We found out after church today that the other Elder ended up sick during the night as well.  We think they ate something that made them sick.  Both are doing better today and said they are eating saltine crackers!  We love you.  Thanks for writing us and for your prayers.

Not Guilty

After visiting the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library on Veterans Day Scott and I headed to Salem, Massachusetts. I vaguely remember the Salem Witch Trials from high school history but low and behold Scott is a direct descendant of the infamous Putnam family so we had to check it out.  The Putnam's daughter Ann was one of the accusers of the victims of the witch trials.  We found the town of Salem is very quaint, old, and charming.  We headed over to the Salem Witch Trial Museum but we found that it only had a gift shop and showed two films so we wandered around a little and ended up in the Park Service information center which had a 38 minute film on the Witch Trials and another film about the settling of the area.  Both were excellent and we learned many interesting facts.  What was fascinating was that Ann Putnam was the oldest of 12 children and both of her parents died in 1699 leaving Ann to raise her nine surviving siblings.  When we got home that evening I wanted to see how old Ann was when her parents died so I went on familysearch.org.  When I found the information on Thomas Putnam and Ann Putnam it showed that they had only four children but when we watched the film they finished by telling us that Ann never married and when her parents both died in 1699 she raised her 9 siblings.  She was 20 years old at that time. I wrote our family history expert Phil Duncan to see if he knew about the additional siblings.  He didn't have any information so I started "googling" and found a site called familypedia.com which gave me a list of 12 children of Thomas and Ann Putnam as well as their birth and death dates and the name of some of their spouses.  It is amazing how much is available to us now to link our generations.  I have passed on the information to Phil and I know he will update the Family Search website.  It was exciting to be involved in finding the children of the Putnam family from the 1600s. In searching for information I also read a letter of apology Ann had written about being a part of the death of innocent people.  A little sight seeing became an interesting experience in the importance of continually updating our family records.