The Worth of A Soul....

...is great in the eyes of God.

As a genealogist, I am accustomed to hunting nooks and crevices for lost souls, kindred spirits, that elusive...clue which leads to the next great find.

But I have to tell you. I have spent the last three Sundays, 10 hours per, on the hunt (different families.) Ancestry.com (the new and NOT improved version) and Familysearch.org/tree have just become so cumbersome to use, that it really sucks all the joy out of the hunt. It really does.

As I said, the past three Sundays, I have spent literally 10 hours per Sunday, glued to a couch, slogging through those miasmic databases. All to add 1 person the first Sunday, and 2 the second Sunday. 

Today by 6:40pm California time, a tiny beacon of light. I spent all afternoon, not really finding much new info (ok, one "child" now 80+ years old just passed away a few weeks ago, found her obituary). Then, perhaps the Almighty (or the departed/deceased) wanted to throw me a bone: I found the name of a child in a related family. I knew about the child previously from a Family Group Record FGR his youngest sister had filled out decades ago. So I knew he was male, and I calculated he was born between 1912/1915. 

I found his parents marriage record in 1913 so that narrowed it further. Then a stroke of luck, or inspiration. I found a death certificate for a child in those years with a mother whose name was transcribed a garbled "close enough." Fortunately, the original death cert was available online, so I took a gander. Eureka !! Inspection of the handwritten document showed the mother was indeed the same as mine; my reward is the child's first name: James. I quickly altered my records at home and online.

I spent much of this afternoon perusing records at Findagrave.com, a treasure trove of information accumulated by volunteers who painstakingly walk the hallowed grounds of cemeteries, many of them abandoned. A true labor of love, so that somewhere, someday, a relative may find them and "claim them" as their own. 

And so it was I came across a solitary tombstone with a little (lost?) lamb motif:

I did not know at 4 o'clock today to whose family she belonged, but it was a surname I was researching, in the county I was researching. I was struck by the plaintiveness of the gravestone, so I added it as an individual record to my database.  Perhaps someday I would find her family.

A few minutes ago I shuffled through some Family Group Records in my collection, many of which contain the same, tired information over and over. 

And then, a light! There, in spidery handwriting, a family group record filled out by the youngest sister. It listed the same information I had seen before: parents, unnamed baby brother, brother Ray, and then a line I had never before seen: Sister. Manona. born and died around 1920.

Perhaps this is what the Savior meant when He said: 

"What man of you, having an hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, does not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness and go after that which is lost, until he find it?

And then when he has found it, he lays it upon his shoulders rejoicing.

And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors saying unto them, 'Rejoice with me; for I have found my sheep which was lost. For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found. And they began to be merry." (Luke 15:4-6, 24 NKJV)

Hours searching high and low through mountains of genealogy rocks. There must be a tumultuous celebration happening on the 'other side' today.

After nearly 100 years, little Manona is finally, safely, back home with her family, where she belongs.

JACOB 5: Fighting back against Evil

It's been a tough political week. By last Wednesday, it felt like good was just being overrun by evil at every turn. Disheartened, I wrote about celery. 

You may recall, in June of 2013, I wrote a blogpost entitled Dancing on Law's Gravestone, which was a post on the death of the rule of law. SCOTUS had just given approval for anyone in power to ignore the law, if they felt like a particular law (in that case, same sex marriage) didn't work for them. People mocked that article, BTW. That's ok. I'm used to it. I got fired from my journalism job in November 2012 for writing Give us A King, and look how prophetic that turned out.

This past week Eric Holder, the US Attorney General, blatantly instructed the state attorneys general that if their state had a ban on same sex marriage, they shouldn't feel they had to defend it. After all, SCOTUS had decided back in June, that if a state decided not to defend a law (in clear violation of their constitutional oath), that was ok: it serves the greater good to pick and choose when you are going to uphold your state's constitution.

Make no mistake: that's what Eric Holder is saying: as a State Attorney General, you can follow his example, and refuse to defend your (state) constitution. SCOTUS has already backed you.

Nevada's AG took that low road. This week a federal judge in Texas decided to overturn Texas' constitutional amendment affirming traditional marriage. In Kentucky, a federal judge decided that Kentucky "had to" recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states. (Are you seeing a pattern? Common word ignoring the Constitution and overriding powers reserved to the states: federal.)

In California, zealot Mark Leno (D-Senate) had introduced (and got passed) the transgender bathroom law, basically eliminating biological gender segregated bathrooms and lockers in favor of "feelings." Californians en masse filed a referendum to overturn this law. Oh wait. WE'RE NOT ALLOWED TO OVERTURN BAD LAW HERE IN CALIFORNIA, SCOTUS said so. So it shouldn't really be any surprise that this week when the signatures were "counted" that the State disallowed 113,000+ of them, just enough to keep the referendum from passing. Wow. Isn't that just a coincidence? 113,000 non-registered voters in California magically decided to get involved to fight against a relatively obscure (at the time) law.  Puhleaze. We can't get 200 people who actually care to get involved and oppose a plastic bag ban here in Huntington Beach, and you want me to believe that over 113,000 people who didn't register to vote ineligibly signed a referendum proposal to overturn a bathroom law??? Right.

Other events this week: the UCLA student government narrowly defeated a Jew-hating resolution for UCLA to boycott any campus business who does business with Israel. Sure, a win is a win, and a thank you to all those UCLA students who stood up and spoke out against this racist resolution, including Ben Shapiro, a well-known UCLA alumnus. But that narrowly? Then Janet Napolitano UC President, spoke out against it--and you know, when Janet Napolitano stands up (after it failed at UCLA campus, so it was safe) for what's right, the world has truly gone mad. 

Those are just the highlights. There were a few glimmers of hope. Dallin Oaks gave a stirring speech entitled "Believers should Join Together to Defend Free Exercise of Faith;" and the speech "We May go to Jail Together," by Albert Mohler, President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary which made the same call was reprinted.

This week made me feel like it was pointless to oppose evil. Not just because of the battle, but because I didn't see anyone caring that evil was winning. Which is the whole point of Evil. Evil doesn't win when something bad happens. Evil prevails when Good gives up.

Then a light illuminated the darkness. A friend of my son's came over on Friday morning. Together we read Jacob 5 (in the Book of Mormon.) Please allow the artistic license, purists can read the complete Jacob 5 here. Jacob 5 is written in allegory. Friday, it clicked. For those who don't know, Mormons believe that they too are part of the House of Israel, largely descended from the tribe of Joseph, and in a more general sense scripturally, America and Israel are synonymous.

"Hearken O House of Israel, and hear the words of me (Zenos) a prophet of the Lord. For behold, I will liken you, O house of Israel, like unto a tame olive tree, which a man took and nourished in his vineyard, and it grew and waxed old, and began to decay."

View point which follows, my own. In my view, America(ns)-- the tame olive tree, nourished for a while, getting older, beginning to decay.

"And it came to pass that the master of the vineyard went forth, and saw that his olive tree began to decay, and he said, I will prune/dig about/nourish it, that perhaps it may shoot forth young and tender branches and perish not....After many days it began to put forth young and tender branches, but behold the main top began to perish."


The allegory goes on to note that "wild" olive branches were allowed to be grafted in. As an experiment. To see what would happen. For a while, these wild olive branches, intermingled with the tame, produced fruit, and everyone was happy. Then seemingly without notice, the wild branches took over the tame olive trees, choking the lifeblood out of the good branches. (Evil) just overran them. And just like that, the tame (good) olive trees began to die off, to the point where the Master of the vineyard had enough and was ready to just burn it all.

The servant fights back against the tide of (evil) wild trees. A good tree is transplanted over here in that corner and begins to grow. A good tree is planted over there in that corner and begins to grow. Slowly but surely, thanks to a solid good foundation/roots of the tree (the constitution? tree of liberty? just saying), and workers protecting and nourishing the roots, younger tame branches start flourishing. They eventually crowd out the wild/evil branches, and the vineyard (freedom?) is saved.

I look at my children. I have made a conscious effort to instill a love of the United States, the Constitution, liberty, the importance of standing for the right. Perhaps you do too. It hasn't been easy--my youngest is studying US Government this year. Frequently, he will stop from his studies with the observation "Mom, how come the Senate/House/President isn't following the Constitution like they're supposed to?" 

That's my 14 year old. It gives me hope.

So did Jacob 5. Awash in a tide of evil last week, I had allowed myself to be distracted and momentarily forgot that the end of the story has already been written: good wins. Evil is vanquished, and evil's death rattle is starting to screech in the night. 

How well good triumphs over evil, is up to us.