Sunday excitement

Well today was.... entertaining to say the least. We really love our ward and we've felt very welcome here. The members are fantastic and lots of fun and I love being in this ward. That being said, there are always a few token crazies, and today was crazytown unleashed. Relief Society was great and we had a wonderful lesson on gratitude after I had finished butchering the hymns on the piano, and Andrew (who already has a calling in the young men's presidency) had a fun lesson on the law of chastity.

It all started going downhill in Sunday School. The teacher is nice enough, but he's a bit.... on a power trip? Which is so not my type of guy... Let's call him Brother A. Basically the lesson was "you guys shut up and let me be the teacher and I'll call on you if I decide to" and of course if you gave a "wrong" answer (read: not the answer he was expecting) you were promptly dismissed. So it didn't really start off all fluffy and happy to begin with and he was seriously getting on my nerves. Oh, also, the lesson was on hypocrisy, which made him doubly obnoxious.

So he gets started and at one point this one sister raises her hand. Now this sister, we'll call her Sister P, is the rambling type, but she's nice and I think the fact that her French is pretty bad probably contributes to her difficulty in expressing herself so I usually don't really mind. She raises her hand and says something vaguely related and Brother A decides she's preaching false doctrine and promptly shuts her up. He quite literally said "you are saying something that is false so I'll stop you right there" and moved on. And nobody SAYS anything!

At this point I'm fuming, but I'm not quite sure what I could possibly have said, especially since I didn't even understand what sister P had said... and then she keeps her hand up the whole time and he deliberately ignores her. Finally near the end he lets her speak as if to be so benevolent, and this is where it gets really awkward. She launches into some unintelligible tirade about evil spirits and casting out devils and whitened sepulchers... and everybody is trying to shut her up. She won't shut up. Then brother P. gets upset and leaves, asking the Sunday school counselor to have someone say a prayer. A really sweet sister gets up and says a 10 minute prayer, bawling the whole time and begging God to "forgive us for chasing you away from our congregation" etc. She was really sweet and actually did bring back a measure of Spirit, but it was so sad to see how heartbroken she was.

But unfortunately, today was fast and testimony meeting, aka get up on your soapbox Sunday for some people. I knew there was the potential for more drama, and I was right. Lots of women bore testimony of the temple (there had been a stake relief society temple trip that week) and one sister talked about her involvement in the UMP (center right political party), and there were a few more randoms. But of course, as soon as people start lining up, sister P gets in line with a smug expression on her face and I knew it was coming. She got up and talked about how we come to church to be healed, and addressing the congregation said "if you are sick you cannot preach to me" and other accusatory nonsense. She sits down and we all breathe in again, but then her husband gets in line and I'm thinking this could either be good or bad.

It was bad. He called "certain people in the ward" to repentance and chastened them for their lack of charity, etc etc citing from scripture and so forth. Ugh. Finally he sits down too and we have more testimonies. At the end of the meeting, the bishop got up and sweetly but very clearly reminded everybody 1) what the point of a testimony was and 2) that he and he alone has the prerogative to chasten/call to repentance the members of the ward as a whole, and that he saw no need to do so at this moment. Laying down the law!

Anyway. Some good mixed in with the bad. I am grateful for people who just get it and who are fantastic leaders. Our bishop is wonderful and carries such a burden. He's doing a wonderful job and there are many great members that move seamlessly from one calling to another to keep things running and running in the right direction. Ha, today our relief society president got released and in the same breath called as the primary president!

In other news... we spent a great long weekend (minus Sunday) with my uncle Charles' family. Unfortunately I've been working too much lately and I had some pretty ridiculous deadlines, but we still had a good time. We went to the local farmer's market, took a bike ride, visited the Val d'Europe (a very big shopping mall that has an outdoor portion with outlet designer boutiques) and spent time playing in their yard and braiding each other's hair while Andrew played Halo with the boys :)

Also, I found the nail polish colors I had been looking for for quite some time now. The only brand I could find that carried them was O.P.I. and I didn't really care to spend $20 on nail polish. I got two awesome colors for $5! I know, it's silly that I'm so excited about something so silly, but it made me very happy.

And for a touch of randomness: you find some interesting things when you're packing...

my dad in action

This is pretty neat: it's our old family bible, with lots of birth dates and wedding dates, etc. I wish my handwriting looked that good!

Have a happy Sunday!

So here's the story

I rocked the genealogy world Saturday, I really did.
Methods of investigative reporting, Comms 308, is KICKING my derrière, quite honestly. But, as you know, according to Newton's second law of motion (hehe) I'm kicking right back with equal and oppositely directed force :)

So this week, we got not one but TWO assignments. One, not so bad, done in about forty-five minutes. The other: Find 10 data items (such as birth, marriage, death) about one ancestor through Web searches. Write a 100-200 word narrative (life history) about your ancestor. Include a source list. Use as many primary documents as possible. Please note the primary documents.

Yeah, not so easy. I ended up spending the better part of my Saturday cooped up in the genealogy section of the HBLL. 


I was originally going to look up my aunt Martha (well really she's my great-great-aunt) who had just passed away this month, but I couldn't find ANYTHING about her so after an hour and a half of beating my head against the computer I gave up and decided to research her husband. And then began my adventure. I had to relocate to campus because you have free access to awesome genealogy websites there, and it ended up being a good thing since I actually needed a real book later on. But we'll get to that soon enough...


After some searching around I eventually found him (George Gladwell Shilling, to be precise) in my aunt's family tree. She is a super genealogist and has done tons of research on my mom's side of the family already, so it was a great starting point. There were a few census records, a draft registration card and a New York Passenger List, and that alone was pretty cool. Check this out!

If you look closely, you'll see him, Shilling, George G. This also indicates that he had had schooling at the time and could read and write. He was still single in 1920, at age 21.He actually got married pretty late, at around 36-37 years old.


But now here comes the cool part. The passenger record from New York shows that he traveled from England to New York in 1933, and on those records he listed as his home address "31 chappel rd seat pleasant Md." Hmm, Chappel Road.. sounds like the address of the priest of a congregation right? I knew he was an evangelical priest during his lifetime, so I figured it was possible that he served a congregation in the city of Seat Pleasant. I looked up the city and the website had some useful tidbits about historic Seat Pleasant, including the fact that there are two chapels still standing from his time, and guess what: one of them happened to be an evangelical church! So at this point I'm pretty excited, but it's really all just speculation. After all, he could have just put down his mother's address for all I know. 

But here comes the best part. The chapel is called Addison chapel, and is also known as st Matthew's. I did some google searching and stumbled upon a book called Directory of ministers and the Maryland churches they served, 1634-1990 by Kanely, Edna A. BINGO! of course google book only previewed a few pages, and not the ones I needed, but by this point I'm hot on his trail. 


And this is the part where I am very, very grateful to have access to one of the best campus libraries in the nation: it just so happens BYU has that very book in the library! So at this point I'm really, really excited and I march on down the stairs, into the U.S. historical records department, find the right aisle, kneel down and start from the bottom up, lift my eyes...

There it is! Both volumes! 
Now I'm really nervous that he won't even be in there and I speculated a whole bunch of nothing. Pull the book off the shelf, flip to "s" ... 

Shilling! Served the St Mattthew's/Addison parish from 1931-1934! WOOHOO!!


And some more google searching unearthed these few gems: 

yep, that's it, Addison Chapel, photos archived at the national library of congress.

So a project that started out impossibly difficult was, in fact, terribly difficult, but WOW I found stuff that no one in my family has, I'm pretty sure! HOW COOL IS THAT?! Moral of the story: genealogy is ridiculously hard work, but it is so cool when you do find something you've worked hard to find. I can't wait to get started on my own tree and let me tell ya, I'll be that little old lady who has her genealogy back to Adam in a few decades :) 

WOW


Also, on a completely unrelated note, I made this for dinner, and it was awesome. (Served with sour cream, grated cheddar and nachos)

I liked it so much, I'm writing it down immediately for posterity. See, you've just witnessed the birth of a family tradition!


This whole assignment and class has also made me aware of how precious documents are. They are the only things we have that give us clues about our ancestors! And even though all my and Andrew's temple work is done (wow, that's a weird thing to realize), I want to begin indexing all of our information. Social Security cards, birth certificates, photos, important documents, journals, letters, mission call, even some pay stubs and videos I did as a reporter. EVERYTHING. And I want to compile this all in a (private) online database (Picasa is an awesome resource that I think might suit this project quite nicely). Someday, one of my grand-daughters will have a class project, and she will hate it, and then she will find all these documents neatly stored together and praise the day I took investigative journalism in college :)


Documents people! it's all about documents!


Oh and also, I have to note this: I got 100% on my first physical science 100 midterm! That's right, the testing center screen said "perfect score!" and it pretty much made my day. No, my weekend. WOW. What a good week that started out pretty crazy.. And now I'm off to bed to start another week.



I do apologize for the excessive number of exclamation points in this post. Forgive my excitement, but believe it or not genealogy is actually very thrilling.