December 6, 2015

Another week of our Mission has come and gone as quick as all the rest which is rather scary.  Things continue to be rather slow on the British Services Zone.   However, that is a good thing as it has given us both time to concentrate a little more on our own research.  Lorene is becoming an expert in correcting errors on Family Search and I am becoming more confident with Ancestry.  It still is rather difficult for Lorene to find new names, and I have been able to find some new names that need to be verified,but the names, dates and places seem to be a good match.

Last night helped put some of my feelings about my grandmothers family come alive and the following is a summary of what felt and learned:

A Trail of Personal Discovery

As missionaries we have been encouraged to share Elijah moments with our zones, and as a fairly new missionary I had always thought those moments were to be about our experiences with our guests to the Family History Library.  However, I have come to realize that such moments also include our experiences with our own family research.  Last night while I was sleeping, I had a dream and a very strong impression that made me realize how pleased I will be to meet my great-grandparents and my great uncle, Gustav Janousky.  This impression was manifested to me as a banner on my FamilySearch Family Tree which simply said: "You will be pleased someday to meet Charles, Clara, and Gustave".

Many years ago when I first expressed an interest in Family History, my Grandmother Walker told me that her parents and step-brother, Gustav, immigrated to the United States from Germany before she was born.  She further told me that Clara, for whom my grandmother is named, was initially Gustave's nanny.  With only their names, dates of birth, and information as to when and where they lived in the United States, I began a search that has lasted many years.

Thanks to my wife's encouragement over the years to do my family history, perseverance, and modern technology, I have been able to piece my grandmother's story together.  I have found several U.S. census records that include my grandparents, ship passenger lists, pictures, and marriage and death records which have verified what she told me.  We all have a story to tell and now is the time to ensure that future generations will know our stories through our own family histories.

In my quest to discover my great-grandparents and great uncle, I found the passenger list that tells me that they immigrated from Prussia on the ship "Rugia," they left from Hamburg, were going to live in Washtenaw County which is in Michigan, and arrived in New York on May 2, 1892.  After being in the United States for only a few days, Charles and Clara were married in Ann Arbor, Washentaw, Michigan on May 7, 1892.  Now, seven-year-old Gustave had a mom again.

Until recently I had run into a brick wall with my great-uncle Gustave.  Gustave is included in a special 1894 Michigan Census and in the 1900 U.S. Census living with my great-grandparents,  his two half-brothers and half-sister, my grandmother, in Ann Arbor.  However, that's where his trail ended.  Recently I found Gustave's death certificate which brought a sad closure to my sleuthing.  Gustave died in 1909 at the age of 22 just before the 1910 Census, and had been recently been discharged from the U.S. Navy. The fact that as a recent immigrant Gustave enlisted in the U.S. Navy tells a whole lot about his allegiance to his new country and also makes me proud to be a military veteran myself.

The research of the census records helped to fill out my grandmother's family unit.  Four boys and two girls (one of which is my grandmother) were born to Charles and Clara in Ann Arbor, and all but one were buried in the same cemetery in Ann Arbor as my great-grandparents, which makes me feel that they were a very loving family.  After my grandmother married in Ann Arbor, she and my grandfather moved to California in the early 1950's and they are buried in same cemetery as my parents.  Researching the Death Certificates of Charles and Clara have provided clues about my great-great grandparents that have sparked an interest in finding the next generation.  Hopefully, I will be as successful in finding out and tell their story too. 

This journey of confirming and discovering the story of Charles, Clara, and Gustave is a personal witness to me that the scriptures are true as they tell us "the heart of the fathers will turn to the children and the heart of the children will turn to the fathers."  Further-more, I know that just as the Holy Ghost is a Being of Spirit that can come to us, Elijah has a tangible spirit that can come to us also. It is through this spirit of Elijah that I have taken this journey and will be pleased to someday meet Charles, Clara and Gustave.  

Steve and Lorene 

December 6, 2015

We certainly are not part of the milineal generation.  The previous post was supposed to have been published last week because that was almost the end of November and it didn't make show up in our blogs, so now you have two blogs to catch up with to see how things are going with the Walkers.

Things have slowed down on the British Services Floor and I think it has more to do with the time of the year rather than a lack of interest in Family History.  Most of the guests in our zone know what the are doing and who they are looking for, or they go directly to the Staff for assistance.  However, we do have some who need help and otherwise we keep ourselves busy doing our own research, or in training.  We have made friends with one of the guests who is from New Zealand and we have been able to help him with his family tree on Ancestry.com or in correcting things in FamilySearch.  He is going to be here for almost a year, so I am sure that we will get to help him many more times,

We have both been given extra assisgnments in our zone which we give new experieces and allow us to be of assistance to our zone leaders.  Our zone leaders are so very dedicated to running the zone and put in so many extra hours to ensuring that the zone runs smoothly, I am glad we help them.  It feels great to be needed and to feel like we are contributing to the zone.  However, Lorene's first love is to be able to help the guests when they come to our floor.  I am not quite there yet, but working on it.  We will be helping with weekly devotionals, music and daily thems, some reports and reviewing new training modules.

On Friday night we took Lorene's brother Wayne out for his birthday and we had a nice visit with him.   Wayne and our son Michael could almost be brothers.  They are both unmarried, live alone and its take little to satisfy them.  Saturday we went to a musical production of "A Christams Carol" at the Hale Centre Theater, and it is what the name implies, a theater in the round.  We thoroughly enjoyed and had the opportunity to spend some time with many of our fellow Missionaries. We had a nice, although very short visit with our daughter and her family last night.  They were here for a couple of family activities for LaVerl's family.  We went over to Temple Square to look at the Christmas lights and then came back to our apartment for hot chocolate to ward ourselves up.  It was nice to spend some time with them.  

We continue to have time to worry about all of our children the problems that have to face in their lives.  Some problems and issues and concerns are greater than others and some times they make good decisions and some times they don't.  However, agency gives them the right to make their own decisions and we continue to hope that when they make the now so good choices that they will learn a better way and not to repeat them.

Steve: It's hard to beleive that November is almost gone and over with.  Even harder to believe is that tomorrow will mark three months that we have been serving as full time Seasoned Missionaries. (Doesn't seasoned sound so much beter than being called Senior Missionaries.  I haven't figured out the average age of the Missionaries that are here, but I belive that we are on the younger side; however, that may be just hopeful thinking.)  This weekend was a little strange for us, we actually had a four day weekend due to the Thanksgiving Holiday.

Speaking of Thanksgiving, our Thanksgiving Day was great, we only had to cook one dish -- green bean casserole.  I guess as a Missionary I should be be more truthful, Lorene actually cooked the casserole, and I forgot which one was hers and didn't even get any of it.  At any rate, we had dinner with about two hundred other Missionares, played games and, most importantly, we had great company.  We ended up sitting at a table with six young elders, and it was the best part of the afternoon.  Our daughter, Katie, encouraged us to have dinner here in the Mission rather than trying to go home, and I am so glad that we did.

This week at the library was a little slow, which didn't surprise me due to the holiday.  I finished my training workbook this past week which was a relief to our Zone Leaders, and which I probably should have done before I received my certificate, but it all worked out in the end.  I am now starting to create my own cliff notes to help me learn how to find ancestors in the various countries included in our Zone which should help me.  Additionally, my mentor seems to be a little more accessible which should be helpful.  We have two new Missionary Couples starting this week in our Zone which will be of great assistance to our guests.  It will be interesting to see how many guests we have come to the library for the next month.  It was a little sad, a group came from another country this past week to primarily do research in our zone and they did not know that the library was closed on Thursday and Friday.  We continue to be happy to be serving in the British Zone and for the knowledge we are gaining.

Lorene has been commenting for the last couple of weeks about how surprised she was that it hasn't snowed.  Well, yesterday Mother Nature must have been tired about hearing the inquires and blessed us with not only cold weather, but also some white, powdery covering to go with it.  I rather liked it, but Lorene would have been more than happy to let the white stuff stay up in the ski slopes.  As for me, I hope this was not the the only snow we get for the rest of winter, but please don't tell Lorene that I said that.

Lorene: I always like to say that I like snow as long as it's outside and I'm inside keeping nice and warm.  It's so pretty to look at, but it's also very cold.  I don't do well with being cold, but I think I'm doing pretty good as long as I bundle up as much as possible. 

I want to tell you about an experience I had this week.  On Thanksgiving morning, I received an email questioning something I did in Family Tree.  Both the woman who wrote and I have ancestors named William McKenzie, and when I did something on mine it somehow affected hers.  So I went on Family Tree to see if I could figure out what I did and why, but it was something I did during our first 2 weeks of training here and I don't remember.  I emailed her back and told her that, and I promised that I would do more research and figure out who belongs to whom.  I told her that as a missionary in the British Zone I have access to many records and professional consultants that can help me.  She emailed me back the following:

Sunday night and all is well here in Salt Lake City.  We have just finished another week and continue to be grateful for the opportunity to serve here and for our new friends we have made over the last couple of months.  Its refreshing to have so many friends that you can rely upon to help you out when needed and just to meet and greet them as often as you can.  Its also nice to be able to borrow things that you don't have here but need to use for a dinner such as an extra chair or a crock pot or potatoes and a roast in order to feed the young Missionaries.

We both had positive experiences on the British Floor this past week helping the guests that were here doing family research.  Its always brings a smile when you either able to help them or to hear about their successes with their own research.  We are feeling a little more confident and I am sure we will as time goes by.  It seems that each week brings a new group who have traveled from long distances to use the resources of the library.  In time we will feel more positive about our own skill levels, but in the meantime there are many other Missionaries in our zone that are willing to help us.  We also are starting to develop a relationship with our zone leaders and appreciate their patience with us, but more importantly to befriend us.  You can never have too many good friends.

In addition to going to the our assignments last week we also traveled to the Bountiful Temple and attended an Endowment Session there.  Its a very beautiful temple and we are glad to have had the means to go there.  We traveled back to Bountiful over the weekend to attend the reception of the daughter of our Financial Adviser, Mark McKell, from California.  Mark is connected to Lorene's family via two Sisters. You'll have to wait for her to get the connections correct.  We also discovered today that one of the Sister's in our Mission is as we figured out so far a third cousin to Lorene.  She has way too many relations here in the Mission.

We had a scare late last week when we heard that my adopted Mom, Sister Sharon Walker, here in the Mission was considering planning on getting released and returning home to Rigby, Idaho.  She is still recovering from here breast cancer surgery and this week marked the one year anniversary of her husband's death.  She is such a sweet lady and we all love her dearly.  We think she has made the decision to finish her Mission here in Salt Lake City. We just need to let her know of our love for her and support her as often as we can.  Its hard to watch her struggle so much.

Its almost time for the editor-in-chief to do what she does best, edit my work.  However, she does not point out my mistakes as much now days, rather she just makes the changes and sends the messages out.  Alas I have been given a reprieve.  The Editor is on her way to get her beauty rest and has ordered me to publish this post.

Steve: It's the ides of November which means that the holidays are right around the corner and that another week has gone by us at the amazing speed of light.  We continue to have more good weeks and good experiences which makes serving on this Mission so worth- while.  I hope that our fellow Missionaires also have good experiences as they serve.

Our Church meeting times have changed beginning today and that is going to be very interesting.  Our meetings will begin at 2:30 and will run until 5:30 which for us Seasoned Missionaries is either the time for a late nap time or late dinner.  The trick will be to have our main meal in the middle of the day and then see if we can stay awake during our meeting times.  The most common thing in the Church is change, and thus we are striving to work with the changes that have been given us.

During this past week my teaching experiences have been somewhat limited.  However, I have been able to shadow a couple of the Missionairies and that has helped my self confidence a little, but I need some more confidence to feel like I can assist our patrons on my own.  I have made a commitment to our zone leaders to get more involved in my own training which should be beneficial.  I also want to start doing some case studies on my own to see if that will point me in the right direction.  We have a new Church Service Missionary that has finished her training and should be joining us beginning tomorrow.  

During this week I did have some positive experiences including the finding of four death certificates of individuals on my family tree, including my great-grandmother, her parents on my mother's side, and a half-brother to my grandmother on my father's side.  In one of the certificates on my mother side I was able to find the name of my great-great grandfather which I did not have before, now I just to find more information about dates and places for him.  I knew about the half brother before, but I only had a name for him.  I previously had his name from the passenger list when he came to the United States from Prussia in 1892 and his name on the 1900 U.S. Census.  However, during this week I found him living with my great-grandparents in 1894 during a Special Michigan Census in 1894 but after 1900 he disappeared from my radar.  Then this week I found his death certificate showing that he died in 1909 thus answering why I could not find him in the 1910 U.S. Census.  Gustav was only 22 when he died and may have have been married according to the certificate which also indicated that he had recently been discharged from the Navy and included his mother's name.  My great-grandmother was originally Gustav's nanny and came to the U.S. with my great grandfather and married him shortly after their arrival in the U.S.

May your coming week be as good to you as our past one has been to us.  

Lorene:  I don't have much to add this week except to say that I have felt the Spirit of the Lord much this week.  I especially have been filled with gratitude for my many blessings and for the Atonement of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.  I am so grateful to be here on this mission and know that the sacrifices we're making to do so are minimal compared to the blessings.  We love you all!
 

Steve:
Another week has left us and it has again been one with both good things as well as things that make us sad.  We both continue to learn and feel that we are moving forward, even though it may be at a snail's pace at times.  We also had a new missionary join our zone and she is from Glendora, California which is near where my family lived after I was discharged from the Air Force.  She knows one of Lorene's cousins who is in her home stake.

We both had good experiences at the Family History Library including the following "Elijah Moment" that I shared with our Zone Leaders:

"Earlier this week I was helping a guest find her 3^rd Great Grandmother and her family.   The guest had information on the 2^nd Great-grandmother and we began a search for number 3.  As a result of our search, we discovered that the information was incorrect as it related to both the formal birth date and name of her 2^nd Grandmother.  We researched FamilySearch to no avail and then moved onto Ancestry to try and find information on her 2^nd Great-grandmother where we discovered the correct name, the marriage date with a copy of the banns record (formal announcement of intent to marry), and her birth year.  The following day I continued, on my own, researching information for this family and was able to locate information from both the 1901 and 1911 England/Wales Census which provided information on her 3^rd Great-grandparents and their children.  To put closure to my research I sent by email copies and images of the information that I discovered to the family in Australia to help them grow their family tree.  I have since found that the associated information has now been added to their FamilyTree. 

As Missionaries we don’t necessarily have huge spiritual experiences as we conduct our own research or help guests with their research on a daily basis.  However, through the Spirit of Elijah we are able to find our hidden ancestors and provide names for temple work to continue our family circles.  Our research efforts are enhanced as we not only let the Holy Ghost guide our efforts, but also as we utilize the efforts of our fellow Missionaries to assist us in our research.  I am grateful also for the assistance of other missionaries for their patience with me and their encouragement to not give up.  Truly line upon and line and precept by precept we are able to help the Lord as He hastens His work."

 
Towards the end of the week came some very sad news.  While checking the local San Bernardino news on line, I came across an article about how the death of local police officer had hit the faculty "hard" at San Bernardino High School.  Upon reading the actual article, I discovered that the police officer was a friend of our family, and he was killed on duty after his car was broadsided at an intersection by a driver who may have driven through a red light.  Bryce Hanes leaves a widow and three children under the age of thirteen.  I have been very touched by this incident not only because of the sorrow I feel for the family, but the remembrance of our own mortality and especially that of our children.  Bryce was only a little older than our oldest son and they were good friends.

To end my portion of this post before turning it over to the Editor in Chief, I would like to report about the Music and Spoken Word broadcast that we attended this morning which was a touching salute to Veterans.  It was very meaningful to me as a Veteran and made me proud and grateful for the opportunity to serve in the U.S. Air Force as well as serving in the Vietnam War.  I am proud to be an American, although at times I am very saddened by the actions and beliefs of many of our citizens.

Lorene:
I don't have much to add this time, but I did find a missing son in a family on one of my collateral lines this week.  He showed up in a census as having the same first name as a son born 2 years after this census was taken.  At first I thought that it was the same son, but then I realized that the differing middle initial was not an error but was indeed a different child.  Through this and another experience with a census record, I have learned not to be hasty with my assumptions.  This other record (of a different family) had the names of two of the three children spelled wrong, so at first I thought it wasn't the family I was looking for but on closer examination I realized it was.

This is a great work we are doing and we are glad to have a small part in it.  We are grateful to be here and grateful to all of those who support us with love and prayers. 

This post did not get sent.  It is from a couple of weeks ago.

Sorry for the lapse in postings, our time has started to get away from me and I have let too much time pass since I last posted.  Apparently we have a follower of our blog by one of Lorene's college room- mates who sent an email encouraging us to post more regularly.  I will try to be more diligent in the future.

We are still in training, but I think as I have said before, it is something we will probably be doing as long as we are serving here.  We have done some training on research in England, Scotland, and Ireland and have much more to learn.  We take turns in getting stressed over our training, but thank goodness it doesn't happen on the same day.  We now have separate trainers and that has been more helpful to Lorene than me.  I am relying a little too much on Lorene and another missionary who has only been here a few more weeks than we have, so I need to repent and work harder on my own. Lorene has been able to shadow with other missionaries often and has provided some excellent help in addition to the help that they have given the guests.  I have had some limited success.  We are also going to start taking some classes regarding our assigned countries and that should be fun.

We and others here in the mission have been having some struggles.  Our adopted mom (we adopted her at the MTC) has recently discovered that she has breast cancer, but she does not plan on letting it get her down for too much time.  She may have surgery, but does not want chemo or radiation.  As determined as she is, she will be fine.  Also, President Larson, the Second Counselor in the Mission Presidency, has been out of commission trying to pass a kidney stone.  The Mission President accused him of waiting to deliver a baby named Stone Larson. We understand that he has now passed it and is doing fine.  Our neighbor's father passed away recently and we went to the funeral as a sign of our concern and our friendship for Elder and Sister Reed. Also, my half brother died a week ago as a result of dementia. One thing we have learned is that life does not stop even for Missionaries, and we so love being Missionaries.

As we continue to serve we understand more and more the need to keep our commitment to study the scriptures on a daily basis, to support one another and to set a good example.  With two granddaughters wanting to go on missions, we also know and feel the obligation to set a good example.  I need to remember the example part more often, especially when I am ready to pull my hair out (kind of an irony wouldn't you say) or when I am ready to ask to work in a different zone or go hide in a corner somewhere.

Well it's almost time for Church, and then in a few more hours time to start another week in the British Zone.  TTFN