I have said it before and I guess I need to say it again.  Maybe someday I will understand that the message is really for me, but I will share my secret with you.  Procrasination is a terrible master and it is not very forgiving.  It is hard to believe that almost a month and a half has passed since we last posted.  I know that I need to be more dilligent in writing about our Mission.

What is even harder to believe is that we have been on our Mission for a little over six months.  It is scary when I think that so much time has passed and I still have so much more to learn, and there's so much that I want to learn, I fear I won't be sucessful in either of these endeavors.  I guess I should be happy with even little positive experiences and feel that they will counted to my good.  The library still is isn't as busy as I had thought and maybe for me that is a good thing because I still tend to be intimidated by our guests.  I hope that in the next couple of months those feelings will go away.

Our assignment as Assistant Zone Leaders is going well.  I still feel that our Zone Leaders are carrying too much of the load, but we try and help where and when we can.  It is interesting tht I find that I share some of the same thoughts with our Zone Leader  although we have never discussed the need or the idea in advance.  Maybe there is something to the adage that great minds think alike (however I am pretty sure my mind is not all that great).

We recently found out that some friends of ours from Cedar City have been called to this Mission here in Salt Lake City.  We are anxious for them to get here and we have heard that they might even be assigned to our Zone.  We shall see.

We both continue to work on our own family lines and get frustrated about or progress, but for separate reasons.  I continue to find more brickwalls than people and it is all the harder because I don't have too many people to collarorate with.  However, I do have a second cousin in Indiana that I have been trying to contact, and I believe that we may contact each other this week.  I previously sent her some information and am looking forward to discussing it with her.  With more and more records being uploaded to the main Family History Websites, the work is getting a little bit easier and if I can ever really learn to be more patient, then maybe I can be more successful.  Lorene continues to try to clean up her family tree and has spent a good amount of time trying to shake some people out of her tree that don't belong there.

Time to turn the keyboard to the person that can take my jumbled thoughts and make some sense out of them.

From Lorene:

I had an experience last week that I’d like to share.  For the past few months, off and on, I have been looking for a 4^th great-grandfather on my mother’s side.  I discovered before coming on this mission that his daughter, my 3^rd great-grandmother Johanna, was probably connected to the wrong family.  She has been listed as the last child of Abraham Winn and Elizabeth Warren for several years, even on the genealogies that I received from my mother.  What I discovered is that Johanna was christened in a different parish than all of the other children.  Upon further investigation, I also discovered that Elizabeth Warren was 52 when Johanna was born and there is a 15 year gap between her and the next oldest child. Although this is possible, it caused me to wonder about her parents.  As I investigated further, I found 3 other children christened in the same parish as Johanna who are closer to her age. The christening records for all of these children have Abraham Winn and Elizabeth (with no maiden name) as their parents.  I decided to try to find another Abraham Winn married to an Elizabeth who is in the parish in which Johanna and these other children were christened.  I started looking in parish records for a marriage record, but after several days of looking I was having no success.  As I continued my search, I had a strong impression that I was taking the wrong approach.  The Spirit prompted me to try a different tactic and to look in Ancestry.com for a birth record for an Abraham Winn who could be Johanna’s father.  After just a few minutes, I found one!  He was born in the same parish where Johanna and the other children were christened and his birth year is consistent with the births of these children.  I feel strongly that this is Johanna’s correct father.  I still need to find her mother, but I know that the Spirit will continue to guide me in my search.