A few years ago my Grandma Faye Townsend passed away. I come from a very small family. She only had three grandchildren, my brother, sister and me. It was hard watching her pass away from cancer in only a two week window. My grandma is not a member of the church and during those two weeks I had the strongest feeling that I needed to do her temple work.
I knew that I could not do her work until she had been dead for a year but I called one of the family history workers in the ward and asked them what I needed to do. She helped me get on to Family Search and reserve her name under my name so that nobody would be able to take her name to the temple but me.
Exactly a year to the day I took my grandmas name to the temple. I was there the whole day doing all of the ordinances for her except the sealing to my grandpa. I don't know how many of you have had the opportunity to do the work for someone close to you but it was the most spiritual beautiful experience I have ever had in the temple. It felt like my grandma was right there with me, like I was walking her through the temple. I cried the whole day.
While I was in the program working on my grandma's name, I realized that my grandpas whole side of the family are not members of the church. I am the only one on my side at this time that is able to do temple work. I felt a rush of excitement and pressure all at the same time as I came to the realization that this was something I needed to take on and do.
Well my second son Porter was turning twelve on the 24th of February. I knew that my goal for February needed to be finding some family names for us to take and do for Porters first time to the temple.
I called my friend from the ward again and she helped me. There is a new program now on Familysearch.org that is very user friendly. You can go in and look up your family tree, there is an option to do indexing and add to your families information, and it will tell you which family members need work and which ones are completed. After some messing around I walked away with twelve new names. My Great Grandpa, my Great Grandma Grace (the one I named my Stella Grace after) and 10 of her brothers and sisters. That was something else exciting, I learned something out about my Great Grandma Grace, I had know idea that she came from a family of twelve kids (one child's work was done). After you find your names there is a print option. You take that form to the temple and they will print up your pink and blue cards.
We were able to take Porter and Bridger to the temple. We had five boy names and seven girl names. I worked on all seven girls and Bridger and Porter split up the boy names. The temple worker also gave each of them five more temple names. Rhett, my husband did all of the baptizing and confirming.
It was such a perfect night having my family there doing my family names. In two more years my daughter will be old enough to go. Then we can be there as a whole family. I have definitely found a new love for family research and temple work. Finding more names and working away at my grandpa's side of the family will be a life long goal for me, one that will bless me and my family in more ways than I can imagine.
March Goal: Redo Stella's room
