Diane the Tenacious

Thank goodness I'm too easily-distracted to really get addicted to things, but I do have my little obsessions from time to time. My latest is Ancestry.com, the site where you can research your family history, create a pedigree chart, and then download it to your computer on a GEDCOM file, ready for further research.

Family history has always been interesting to me. I like history in general, but it's much more fun to know the human side of it. Genealogy research on my mother's side has been fairly extensive, more recently thanks to my cousin Susanne's husband, Neil. On my father's side, however, things have not been painstakingly recorded, and for the longest time I only knew about five generations back on the Dahlstrom side and two or three on the Chaffee side.

Between finishing fellowship and starting work in San Diego in 2005, I took a little trip to Sweden and Denmark to do some on-site research. I was spurred on by those faith-promoting stories that are published in The Ensign telling of people who travel great distances to find their ancestors and just happen to run into the one person who has the key to the archives, or who is a distant cousin. I really thought that would happen, but I was thwarted at almost every turn. Not that it wasn't really cool to see the towns these people came from and revel in the beauty that is Sweden in the summer, but I was really bummed. I tried to get some information from the main Family History library here in San Diego a couple of years ago, but that was also practically fruitless.

Working at the temple for the last six months inspired me to go back to work on my genealogy. That, and the feeling that if maybe I focused my work on my more immediate ancestors, things would fall into place. About two months ago, I finally sat down at my computer and tried Ancestry.com. It is free for the first three days, then you have to sign up for either a month or a year subscription. I admit to using all three of my email addresses for free trials at first, but I finally broke down and bought a month's subscription.

Within about fifteen minutes of being on that site, I had made contact with a distant Dahlstrom cousin, Carma Russell. She sent me pictures of my Swedish pioneer ancestors, family group sheets and a family history that explains how we really ended up being Dahlstroms, not Carlsons or Barnecos.

The best thing about Ancestry.com is that you put in your pedigree chart information, then the site searches its entire database for any matches. From that, you can extend your pedigree chart further, without having to do more than double-check to see if that's really your ancestor and the dates and places make sense. Last week, Rowdy's Aunt Jeanne sent me a package of Rookstool genealogy. I entered it into Ancestry, and discovered that Rowdy is a descendant of Pocahontas. Who knew?

Spurred on by that discovery, I went to work on an ancestor of mine on my dad's side, Amanda Alexander. I have tried to follow her line several times, but last Sunday, things finally opened up. I was able to follow her line back to the Plantagenets and beyond. I'm a descendant of (among other people) Fulk the Rude, Pepin the Short, Marc Antony, Aminhotep, some random Turkish woman, and several concubines as well as Ruth and Boaz, David and Bathsheba, Jacob and Rachel (and Leah), Isaac and Rebecca, Abraham and Sarah!! Once you hit royalty, whichever side of the blanket your ancestor was born on, you can follow the line back in perpetuity. And I mean that literally, because yesterday I followed that line back to Adam and Eve.

Being a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints my entire life, I have always had an intellectual understanding that all of the human race is related, that I am a literal descendant of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and that Jesus Christ atoned for everyone who ever lived. I knew that temple work was important to seal families together. But I didn't really have as strong a testimony of all those things as I do now, from the seemingly cheesy process of doing genealogy by clicking a computer key.

Now the kings, queens, emperors, pharoahs, blacksmiths, serving girls, farmers and Coca-Cola bottling plant owners that I come from are real to me. Reading the scriptures means even more to me. Temple work has become an even greater priority. I'm even more grateful for the lineage I come from and more aware of how important every single person ever born is to our Heavenly Father. The scripture reference of "turning the hearts of the fathers to the children and the children to their fathers" makes much more sense now, because my heart has been turned.

Fulk the Rude...hmmm...wonder what he did that made people mention his rudeness specifically?