Week 14

With the New Year well under way, this month is flying by! Our week was super busy but also rewarding in several ways. We have loved hearing from our kids and even receiving emailed movie clips from Patrick so we can see our fast-growing Portland grandkids. We finally received our delayed gifts from home and appreciate each thoughtful item. We love spreading out a holiday and this one certainly was. 

The other day I was talking with Sister Husz, our matron, about Christmas traditions and she described their Christmases with their children and they sounded really appealing. Gift giving was spread out over several days--beginning Christmas Eve when each child received one gift. The next day there was another gift, a process that went on for a couple of more days. The focus each day was on enjoying that item rather than getting caught up in the sense of "is this all?" It was interesting to hear about it. In good German tradition, they don't set up their tree until Christmas Eve but then leave it up until after January 6th--the day they call "Three Kings Day." 

The temple, as always, was at the center of our week and we enjoy serving there as we continue in our assignments of scheduling the work done and planning and training the temple workers. John does a great job with presenting in German and I continue to use the assistant to the matron as my interpreter each time. She is an amazing translator and a wonderful person.  She and her husband are from Darmstadt and are good friends with President and Sister Uchtdorf.  We are also busy writing and editing the training guides.

The president and matron are in the center, flanked by counselors and assistants

Thursday evening all the missionaries went to the president’s apartment to have a group photo taken, which is very nice to have. Elder AJ Kingsford, who used to be in the family history mission and is here serving as the assistant recorder, used to do all the missionary photo shoots in SLC, hauled his camera along with him and we are happy he did. Nice to have skillful people here. While in the Family History Mission he also served as the leader of the British zone, so he is a good one to have around as we work on our own family history.

And that is exactly what we have been doing, every minute we can squeeze into our schedule. We have received such a load of documents via email and flash drive from John’s distant cousin, Hugh Laing, with whom we toured the Puslinch, Wellington, Ontario, Canada, area on our way home from China, and we are finally making some really headway in controlling and organizing the deluge.

John has been busy cataloging all the items according to record type and then passing them along to me to begin inputting them into our Laing chronology or directly into Roots Magic—whenever we can tell where they fit.  Often we work side by side with John reading from his laptop while I enter the information—much more effective than my having to toggle back and forth. My memory is a sieve and by the time I look up something and go to type it in, I can’t remember anything! We miss our extra monitors but manage OK for now, working together. We are trying to get to the point in the next couple of days to ship off copies of documents to cousins and others who are interested in helping with extraction.

It has been particularly satisfying to have found a number of little lost souls—information about babies who died and who have never shown up in our family records. We know that as we continue to work there will be other exciting discoveries in building these families. It was exciting for us to also actually have cards to take to the temple for once.

For the last several years, John and I have not given each other Christmas gifts—there just isn’t much in the way of things that either of us wants. Instead we enjoy experiences together. This year was like that too. No gifts for each other but we enjoyed our trip to Munich. But we have now given each other a belated gift we are really enjoying—a subscription to Ancestry.com. From it we are finding a wealth of information to support our research project. This scribbled document may not look like Christmas to you but it sure feels like it to us!

The other interesting part of our week has been the launch of our English Gospel Doctrine class, which began yesterday. We got permission to hold it, taking turns teaching, so that we can enjoy actually discussing the gospel, not just trying to guess at what the teacher is saying in Deutsch. It is amazing how much we have missed being able to do so. Thus far only six missionaries attended but next week the bishop will announce the class and we may even get some of the other ward members to attend as well—there are a number of American girls here who have married Germans. They speak German but perhaps would enjoy a taste of English too.  We go to sacrament meeting (in German, of course), then over to the missionary room for Sunday School, and back to Relief Society and priesthood in the church building. This new start has really brought a lift to our Sunday.

We hope you are enjoying this astonishing New Year. We are determined to make the most of it and savor every day.

Alles Gute.