We had our inspection tour, as usual, and enjoyed visiting the missionaries in the St. Gallen Switzerland zone. I am posting a few pictures. We also had a zone conference in Freiburg, Germany. It is quite a drive to get there, but it was a very nice conference. We saw some snow along the road, but other than that, we ask ourselves whether winter has come here at all. There has been no snow to speak of at all here where we are, and temperatures never much below 32 F (0 C).
Some of the fun times we have had lately is with family history with some of our members. One of our members is a very spry 87 years old and has a great zest for life, reminding us of our dearly departed Sister Wilcox back home. She did not have much genealogy done, so I started looking things up for her and found quite a bit, including the report of her grandfather's death in World War I. She had not heard that he died in the war. Sister B has been working on helping another of the members in her family history work, including some records that were mandated by the Nazi government in the 1930's and 1940's. Because of that work, she has a lot of good research information. As Sister B helped her get the information entered into the FamilySearch Tree system, she was pleasantly surprised to find some names were already there, from some of the indexing projects over the years, and that the indexed information exactly matched the records in the family genealogy records that were assembled as part of the Nazi program. If you do not know the history, the Germans were required to prove their genealogy going back a number of generations, in order to prove that they were not Jewish.
Another person we have been helping is a sister who also has a fair amount of information assembled, but not in these kinds of records. It showed that one of her aunts died in the Ravensbruck concentration camp. She told us that she was there for trying to help hide some jews during the war. An uncle of hers also died in the war, fighting against the Russians on the eastern front.
It is interesting that our little branch has a functioning Family History Center that has been running for over 20 years, but that the members rarely use it. It is mainly used by non-members who come here to do research.
We had our stake conference last weekend. We had our normal Saturday meetings, but the Sunday meeting was a broadcast session for all of German-speaking Europe. We watched the broadcast in the Dornbirn, Austria chapel. One of the speakers was Elder Bednar. He served his mission in Bavaria 40 years ago and gave his talk entirely in German. The other speakers spoke in English and were translated into German for the broadcast. The focus of the meeting was in finding and bringing back less-active members. That is quite a challenge here. Over the years, people are baptized and then get lost through moving, marriage to non-members and moving. That is part of what I am doing here - trying to find these lost members. It is quite a challenge.
Well, after all that, here are some pictures.
approaching Lake Constance
The ferry across Lake Constance (Bodensee)
The mountains near Ebnat
The elders in Konstanz
The above pictures were from our inspection tour. The next ones are from Zone Conference in Freiburg.
crossing a bridge system on the way to Freiburg
through a canyon long the train line
some statues and the traffic in Freiburg
getting ready for a picture of the zone - Freiburg chapel
Sister missionaries with Sister Miles (mission president's wife) and Sister B on each end.
Thanks for your stories of family history. Those are remarkable, like how, despite the horrific reasons for gathering family history for the Nazis, we can still use it to bless people.
ReplyDeleteYou are wonderful and we are praying for you!