Temple Date

This Saturday Mike and I were in a much needed "Outside Date" so before planning any dinner, movie, fun activity I felt we needed to attend the temple first. So thanks to our babysitting Co-op we had a volunteer to watch our 2 lovely toddlers.

Anyways the time we spent in the Bountiful Temple was amazing. We walked out of there ready for this crazy life. But what was more amazing was what I didn't do.

While talking to a temple worker Mike and him were talking about one of his ancestors. When he asked Mike if he knew him- my hubby didn't. That's OK since Mike comes from a long line of saints. But this caused Mike to come home and researched and found out that the man that Mike was talking about was a pioneer who came from England after being converted to the church. He and his family started in New York and walked to Chicago. But instead of joining the Willie Martin Handcart Co. he stood in Chicago since his wife just gave birth and needed a few days to rest. But the few days actually turned into a few months where his wife and young child died. They were buried in Chicago..somewhere. But he did make the trek to the Salt Lake Valley and settled in Herriman where he's buried there with his second wife and their children.

I thought this was so interesting. I had dabbled in my genealogy off and on but there's only so much I can find doing regular searches. But this lead me to Ancestry.com  where I signed up for their 2 week free trial. In the past 3 days  I have found over 300 years of my ancestors from Illinois, Indiana, and Kentucky who immigrated from Baden-Wuerttemberg, Germany. But also a few from Austria, Prussia, and Poland. So I immediately called my mom to ask her tons of questions to see if I was on the right trail....which I am!

But the most awesome part was as I was searching and adding names there was a name with a link to a pedigree chart from someone in Germany. So this person had all the family members from 1800's and earlier who were in Germany. But lost track as they traveled over to America. And I had all the names from the US so once I clicked on his link it all connected. His chart and my chart. So I have a relative somehow related to me who's in Germany also doing genealogy. That's so AWESOME!

So now I've officially catch the genealogy bug and I'm loving it.