Indexing

Last summer, (August ’17) a friend challenged my husband to read the Old Testament straight through, beginning to end. We both took up the challenge, I reading the complete standard works of my church, and he reading the old testament from three different translations. I succeeded in my challenge in August ‘18, but again I was confused by  Malachi 4:6.

“And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse”

I know it has to do with family history; but besides wanting to know more about my family, and wishing I had asked my parents before it was too late, was there something I was missing?

This week our church group of women and girls challenged the men and boys to a contest in Indexing for one month. Indexing is an opportunity to transfer government records to computer files so people will be able to access them to do their genealogy.

With dread, I thought, “Okay I can do this for a month”. Anything for the cause.

I started with beginners. The draft records from World War I, “Ho Hum, way before my time.” But, my mind started drifting as I was typing. My husband’s father was in WW I, I wish I’d known him and heard his stories. He use to walk around down town Richmond, VA, and talk to the Civil war vets that still survived. What stories they had! By the third batch, I was thinking of my uncles in WWII. Three of my father’s younger brothers enlisted. Imagine how their mother felt to have nearly half of her living children off to war at the same time, and against the country of her birth! One of them did not survive. 

Today I started a batch of cemetery records. One family had a child die in infancy, another was a still birth, then the father from the flu. It reminded me of my father’s mother. Her first daughter died at two with a heart ailment, her second at birth. Because of the flue Pandemic, my grandmother was in quarantine at home. The midwife outside the bedroom window yelling instructions. Her third daughter had a heart attack at age twelve. How grateful I am for the advances in medicine.

My heart has indeed turned to my fathers. I will stay with the indexing and try to find out more about our families, and extended families. I’m hooked! But really! What does it mean when a one month, four- day old child dies of a “Summer Complaint” in 1915?

What do you know about your great-grand parents?