2011 BYU Family History Conference

What a wonderful week!!  Not only was it a week of inspiration and learning, but it was spent with my wonderful daughter, Marie.  We spent from July 25 to July 29 at BYU's annual Family History Conference.  This year's theme was, "Strengthening Ties that Bind, Families Together Forever."   We heard from keynote speakers, Dennis Simmons, (Church Authority)  D. Joshua Taylor, (NEHGS) and Ransom Love, from Family Search.  They were all amazing.  Marie and I took classes on Power Point, Excel, Preserving, Tracking English, Ancestors and every class taught by Joshua Taylor.  He is amazing!

The car gets parked when we arrive and not used again until we are ready to leave.  We walk everywhere and spend our evenings out browsing around the campus.  Each building is a story of it's own with displays, artifacts, and hours of browsing possibilities.  I could stay on that campus for days.  Of course, we ate at the Creamery two times and the Brick Oven once.  It's a good thing we do much walking.

Maurice Lee-Thomas: Photos

Here are a four photos of Maurice.    Note the snow in the background on the two pictures which I believe to be either prior or soon after his marriage.  The picture was taken in Ogden, Utah at the home of Florence Christensen's parents (Andrew and Mary), 529 Seventh Street.  The picture by the old car was taken at the same place, but the snow is gone.  He looks to be close to the same age so probably taken in the mid 1930's.  The railroad picture is an unknown date.  I need to find out when he started working for the railroad and that will give a clue.  Hope everyone enjoys these pictures.  I have a few more to be forthcoming.  Here is the link:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10071252/Pictures%20of%20Maurice%20Lee-Thomas.pdf

Deseret News Article

This was a huge surprise!! My Blog was featured in the Salt Lake City Desert News on Thursday, July 14.  The lady who wrote the article called me one day, said she wanted to do a newspaper article on blogs, and had found mine.  It caught her interest.  I really couldn't believe it.  Anyway , she interviewed me and here is a link to the article.

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700151617/?s_cid=document-suggest. 

Some Thoughts on America

July 2, 2010 was the annual "Stadium of Fire" at the BYU football stadium.  It has been a family tradition now for the past 20 years to attend this annual event.  It is a very inspiring patriotic program and has become such a tradition that we may as well cancel Christmas as this summer event.  Each year during the fireworks display, the song from Neil Diamond, "Coming to America" is played.  That always brings tears to my eyes as I think about my ancestors who "traveled far" and suffered much hard ship to come to America.  It took much sacrifice for them to leave their families and everything familiar to come to a new land and life was not easy for them even after they arrived in America.  How grateful I am to all of them.  I love America and am comforted to know that our country has a divine destiny and that righteousness and America will prevail.

From Ruby Thredgold's journal I quote: "  It was a great undertaking to sell up everything and make preparations to move so many of us across the seas. . . .I could spend hours and many pages writing, telling of the sacrifice and hard work.  It was going to take a lot of money to get us across the huge basin of water.
After selling all we had , and nothing left to manage with, we lived our last six weeks in Australia."  They sailed on the U. S. Sierra.  "It was 11:00 am on the 1st day of November 1930 that we sailed out of the beautiful Sydney Harbor into the great Pacific Ocean.  We arrived in San Francisco on the 20th of November 1930."

You can listen to Neil Diamond's "Coming to America." on "youtube."