Training Zone--January, 2011

We’ve had a good week at the Training Zone working with young elders. They both came with PAF files and are very computer-savvy. They were assigned to Tech Support and Data Support. My student’s parents were both the first members of their families to join the church but they have done a tremendous amount of research through Ancestry.com. It was a blessing to add to their files information on the Scottish and English lines. The church has extracted most of the old Scottish records and we were able to find give English censuses for his great-grandfather which gave us information on the children and grandchildren who did not came to the United States. The Salt Lake Temple is closed for two weeks for cleaning so we went to the Bountiful Temple. John drove one of the church vans and it was a lovely experience.

President Monson is calling again for more missionaries again this month in the Ensign. We have 34 Church Service Missionaries arriving this month so they have divided the group in half. We will have two weeks of CSM’s this month and no call back training for currently serving missionaries nor time for in-service or personal research time. They are also updating the yellow PAF manual. The pink new.FamilySearch manual which has been prepared under the direction of Sister Pethel has gone through “correlation” and is available online to the entire church.

I received more information from Henrietta Hecker Wheeler and was able to enter part of it. The new information coming online through the church websites is amazing. I have learned that often it is just an index so by going to the original images, that even more information is available. That family wants their work done and our experiences in the temple doing their names are very spiritual. Saturday I spent much of day sorting through genealogy boxes. I have so much information and it needs to be put into meaningful, concise files. The disproven and duplicate information needs to be removed. It is a hard job because I have so much emotional investment in these people but it needs to be done.

My cousin Lynne Rasband and her brother Clyde went to San Francisco for Aunt Lillian Lennon Rasband’s funeral. She was buried at Holy Cross Cemetery-Colma in San Francisco on Thursday, Janaury 20, 2011, her 101st birthday in the family plot with Uncle Ray, her sister Marie, and her parents.