A Week of Heart-Turning

Having vacation leave saved up but not enough moolah to actually go anywhere - yet needing a break, I took the week off and spent it in the LDS Family History Library just off Temple Square.

My work station(s)

Luck or inspiration usually got me one of my favorite spots to plop down with a FHL computer next to a microfilm reader. Then I can switch chairs easily between computer and microfilms of ancient records (18th Century, mostly). My little netbook tags along too because you can't have too many computer screens up. It especially helps jumping from the index to the pages of my wonderful online source The Registers of Glasbury, Breconshire, with free access thanks to BYU's Harold B. Lee Library.

Of course I have up on the big screen there, my chronology of my ancestral surname forebears. With a whole week I was able to work out a couple of dozen names of distant aunts, uncles, and cousins I can take to the Temple. And on the last day (that's the usual time-table of the Lord) I had my breakthrough. I found the 1753 marriage of my oldest connected surname ancestor (so far) which gave me the maiden name of his wife - my many-great Grandmother. Now I can claim to be a Powel too - another solid Welsh name. I found a first-born daughter we hadn't know of as well. The record was just sitting there in the next parish - peripatetic progenitors tracked down again.

Imagine going through hundreds of pages like this all week.

Very content fulfilling the spirit of Elijah, not to mention prodding from Elder Richard G. Scott last Sunday, as well as, ahem, from the other side of the veil, I had to come home and print out my sheet to take it to the Temple to have the pink, blue, and tan cards printed out so I can pass the pink and blue on to my kids for baptisms and then have plenty of names for other vicarious Temple ordinances.

For we without them cannot be made perfect; neither can they without us be made perfect. Neither can they nor we be made perfect without those who have died in the gospel also; for it is necessary in the ushering in of the dispensation of the fulness of times, which dispensation is now beginning to usher in, that a whole and complete and perfect union, and welding together of dispensations, and keys, and powers, and glories should take place, and be revealed from the days of Adam even to the present time. And not only this, but those things which never have been revealed from the foundation of the world, but have been kept hid from the wise and prudent, shall be revealed unto babes and sucklings in this, the dispensation of the fulness of times. D&C 128:18.

ADDENDUM
Saturday, October 13, 2012

Checking out Llowes, Radnorshire on the web, we apparently missed something else on our trip to the ancestral lands that we'll have to go back to see. Connected to the Mabinogion, King Arthur, and even the mad woman (or witch), the historical Maud de Braose who built Hay Castle - the 7th Century Cross of St. Meilig now in the Parish church at Llowes:

Attribution to Jeff Tomlinson
under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

The ancient stone cross was in the churchyard at the time of Roger & Elizabeth's wedding. It was only placed in side in 1956 to protect it from the elements. [from Wikipedia]