Our Frozen Adventure + Genealogy Fun

This week was a pretty uneventful one, filled with work for Jake and things around the house for me. I've been steadily working my way through a lot of TV shows on Netflix, and I'm probably an expert at this point as to which shows are worth your time or not. So anyone needing any suggestions, you know where to find me!

On Friday Jake got off of work a few hours early, and we decided to have our date "afternoon." I'd spent the day looking online for some fun outdoor things to do around Rexburg, since we're starting to warm up slightly (it was a whole 50 degrees the other day!) and we need something to do that will get us out of the house. I found a place called Herbert Ghost Town that sounded interesting, so Jake and I set off on our adventure to find it. The "town" was really just an old shack out in the middle of nowhere, but knowing the history behind it made it cooler--Herbert was a really small town just south of Rexburg that was operated until the 1940s, when the invention of the car made it much easier for people to live in Rexburg than all the way out in the boonies. At one point, the town had as many as 150 citizens, woah! They were mostly farmers, since the area is entirely surrounded by farmland. The one building left standing was a two-room store, and it's actually still in fairly good condition. If we'd been able to get out into the field we would have been able to actually go inside, but the field was filled with snow and mud and we did NOT wear the right shoes haha. And while this information is exciting, it's not as exciting as what happened when we actually got to the area.

To get near the old store, you take a very narrow gravel road that leads down the hill. We pulled up near the store and of course there wasn't a parking lot, so I suggested to Jake that he just pull off the road and park so we wouldn't be in the way if someone else happened along. Jake pulled off to the side, but the area we were in was FILLED with snow...and we went down hard into a ditch. It was deep enough that the back driver's side wheel of our car was off the ground! Jake and I spent about 20 minutes trying to get out, with no luck. So finally Jake called his boss, who owns a truck, and he came and towed us out. On Saturday when Jake went in to work, he got made fun of quite a lot...but it was all in good fun, and definitely an adventure!

On Saturday I suddenly remembered that I had some genealogy stuff on my mom's side that I'd been wanting to do, but had gone to the back of my mind while I was in school last semester. So I pulled out the binder, and started working. That's how I spent my Saturday night while Jake worked the night shift, and Sunday after church.

On Sunday after church, I looked into the family history information I had on my dad's side just out of curiosity. I came to a page where I saw a woman, Cordelia, who had no maiden name. Her parents and any other ancestors past that weren't there of course, so the family line stopped there. I started snooping around on FamilySearch to see if I could find Cordelia's parents and after about half an hour, I found her mom! I compared all the records I had to make sure the information matched up, and contacted my Uncle Mike who's the genealogy champion on my dad's side of the family, and we figured out that the woman I found, Eliza, was definitely Cordelia's mother. I've been interested in family history work since the summer of 2013, and this was my first contribution to our family tree! It feels so great to be a part of finding our ancestors, not just looking at the work that's been done by my extended family.

This Week's Spiritual Thought

This week while Jake and I were doing our scripture study in Alma, we read about Amalikiah, a man who was angry with Moroni, a prophet. One of the things that I noticed about Amalikiah was how quickly he became angry with Moroni, and it occurred to me that Satan uses anger as a weapon. I've heard people say before that the Spirit can't be around when we're angry or holding a grudge towards someone, but I'd never really thought of the fact that this means that Satan uses those emotions against us. So my goal for the week is to make sure I don't give Satan another weapon to use in his arsenal against me!