This semester I'm taking a Beginner's Family History Class in Institute. It's pretty fun because our teacher will share an easy tip and then set us loose to do whatever family history work we want. I was able to do a few things, but then was stuck. I've been looking at Mom's side because Dad's is almost totally done (though I did find a whole line of Pidds that hadn't had their work done) and I can't really find my way back further than what was already in there.
Well, when I went to Idaho Falls for Labor Day I snagged my pedigree chart and a few stories that were in my mission stuff. The mission list said I needed to bring some family history stories and I never used them, but hung on to them. So I've had these few things the whole month of September, kept in my school folder with my syllabuses etc in case I needed them for my family history class.
Last Tuesday when I was almost done with work I was looking through my folder and started reading one of the stories. It's a news article about George Hicks (mom's great-great-grandfather) and how he helped settle a place in Illinois. If you can believe it, this article has the names of his wife, all of his children, who his children married, some of the names of their children, where they lived, it has the name of his second wife who he married after his first wife died, who was also widowed and has the name of her first spouse and kids. All together it has the names of at least 35 people. And MOST of those are not already in family search.
It's a miracle! So I've been going crazy the past few days, in a family history frenzy, just trying to add all of these people and trying to find their kids' kids, locating the censuses and marriage documents in family search, finding their headstones in findagrave.com (my new favorite website). It has been really cool! And it's a lot easier to find information coming forward from George Hicks than it was trying to go backwards. So much to do!
Thursday, October 3, 2013
Tuesday, October 1, 2013
Neighborhood Council Meeting
Trevor and I went to a neighborhood council meeting a few weeks ago. Basically I had been thinking about local politics because the teacher for my Intro to Political Science class has been talking about how uninformed and ignorant most* Americans are. And I thought to myself, I don't know who the mayor of Logan is. I don't vote in non-presidential elections. Thinking about this, on some Sunday our Bishopric made an announcement encouraging people to participate in politics and in fact there was a neighborhood meeting that Tuesday at the elementary school. So I told Trevor, I want to go to that.
At work the day of the meeting I did some research and found who my state House representative is, who Utah's Senators are, the mayor of Logan and all of that. (I felt like I really needed to look up the Mayor because I would feel really stupid at the meeting if he was talking and I didn't know who he was.) And I felt all ready to go to the meeting.
We went and at first it was fantastic! They gave everybody some green dot stickers and there was a line of posters that we could put a sticker on and share our opinion on Property Maintenance standards (which was the topic of the meeting). It was a lot of fun and I felt politically empowered! Then we all sat down in the gym and they opened the meeting up to discussion. This is where it got disappointing. Everybody was complaining about their sidewalks and their neighbors' yards. Everybody wanted the City people to fix it. They wanted to know why the extra money from the water budget was being put into the general City budget because it was indirect taxation. Lalala.
This experience made me realize why nobody wants to participate in government! The meeting was over an hour long, Trevor and I couldn't find a good point to make our exit until we had been bored for at least half an hour, and there wasn't even good discussion on the topic of the meeting. It was just a bunch of (generalization) old people who wanted to complain and it ended up being very frustrating.
Will we go to another meeting? Probably. I feel a little obligated since I'm majoring in political science and it is a good thing to participate in local politics. I hope that future meetings will be a better experience!
*Which is an opinion. It could only be half of Americans are uninformed, etc.
At work the day of the meeting I did some research and found who my state House representative is, who Utah's Senators are, the mayor of Logan and all of that. (I felt like I really needed to look up the Mayor because I would feel really stupid at the meeting if he was talking and I didn't know who he was.) And I felt all ready to go to the meeting.
We went and at first it was fantastic! They gave everybody some green dot stickers and there was a line of posters that we could put a sticker on and share our opinion on Property Maintenance standards (which was the topic of the meeting). It was a lot of fun and I felt politically empowered! Then we all sat down in the gym and they opened the meeting up to discussion. This is where it got disappointing. Everybody was complaining about their sidewalks and their neighbors' yards. Everybody wanted the City people to fix it. They wanted to know why the extra money from the water budget was being put into the general City budget because it was indirect taxation. Lalala.
This experience made me realize why nobody wants to participate in government! The meeting was over an hour long, Trevor and I couldn't find a good point to make our exit until we had been bored for at least half an hour, and there wasn't even good discussion on the topic of the meeting. It was just a bunch of (generalization) old people who wanted to complain and it ended up being very frustrating.
Will we go to another meeting? Probably. I feel a little obligated since I'm majoring in political science and it is a good thing to participate in local politics. I hope that future meetings will be a better experience!
*Which is an opinion. It could only be half of Americans are uninformed, etc.
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