6 November 2016

This last week as has been pretty routine and not a lot of change in schedules. I began trying to clean up my English line on the Fowlers. One of the lines is the Bradshaws and the Halls. I am of the opinion that English research is hard. I have families that have been combined with each other's children. The trick is to figure out which of the children belong on my line and which ones have to go. All I need is one record with enough information that will help me identify which town, and time period matches the known records. Right now I will just say, wish me luck and send your prayers. This is not my speciality by any means.

We got to work in the baptistry last week and what was going to be just one sister turned out to be two sisters and a family of five. It proved to be a great experience for the sisters that I was training and for the family that came. This was their son's first time doing baptisms for their ancestors in the temple and it was special to be part of their experience.

The FHC has been pretty slow. I spent my time on Thursday solving problems with mission microfiche and back ordered microfilm. Some days I wonder how anyone can communicate without misunderstanding. I am still working on the lost microfiche and will probably have to reorder and get settlement from Fed-Ex as they lost it, and I discovered that when microfilm is backordered it means that they have to make it and the minimum time allowed is 90 days and then it is whenever they get it done. That doesn't come across very good to patrons and I felt really uncomfortable telling them that. I did offer that he could get reimbursed if he wanted to cancel, but he said he was not worth the trouble.

The last two days they have been having the New York Marathon that usually brings in over 60,000 people and our apartment complex was right at the end of the run. I opted not to take the subway to church today because I was not in the mood to be nose to nose with strangers. Instead I attended the Manhattan ward that meets in our building. It was so nice to just walk around the corner to church. 

I have attached some pictures of the street where the race was ending. This is right outside our apartment entrance. In order to cross the barriers, we had to give the police our address. Security was really tight on all the cross streets were blocked from any cars or traffic all day Sunday.

NYC Marathon spectators - corner of Columbus Ave and 66th Street

A Maraton Runner celebrating her finish just outside our apartment entrance.

NYPD was out in force. Columbus Avenue in front of the Church Bldg and Temple.

While Diane stayed at Lincoln Square, I took the train to Inwood and numbers of people was very light.  Our second cohort group started today in the Sunday School FH class.  It was very successful and the 4 who were there got right in and started working on their My Family: Stories That Bring Us Together online booklets.  In the process they started to work on their trees and a couple were full trees and a couple were partial trees.

Next week when we introduce them to cleanup and standardizing, they will be in pretty good shape to do this.  I think this will be a good group and the printer finally got hooked up (although no paper) and still needs to communicate with Salt Lake, but we have made headway.

Getting back to Linclon Square from Inwood wasn't real heavy on the train until we got to about 79th Street and the crowds really piled in because that was the end of the marathon for the early runners and then they started to head back downtown towards Staton Island and the hotels, etc.  It was really difficult getting off the train at 66th STreet-Lincoln Square as the people were stacked 5 or 6 deep trying to get on the subway while I was trying to get off!  But they started to separate as I came through like we did when I was a kid and there was a herd of sheep in the road.  Dad would have one of us get out and start to walk in front of the car and the sheep would scatter to either side as the car drove through behind us.

On Thursday, after officiating initiatory and endowments, I got to stay longer and several sealings were completed for family file names.  So it was a good week for our own personal family history, even though it was quite slow at the Family History Center here in Manhattan.