This week was full of cousins!
First Katie's family came up for MLK Day which was so fun. Our Christmas plans with them were cancelled time and time again between all the sickness in both our families, so it was so fun to finally see them.
Later that week, Ali and Matthias flew out with their kiddos to ironically pick up a car that they bought here in Fort Collins. They've been on a few lists at different dealerships to snag a car before summer and the one in Fort Collins came through first. But.... the car is a little delayed, so Matthias ended up flying home on Sunday and Ali and the kids are here waiting to drive it home. I have to tell you... having storms and sicknesses and car logistics strand my family at my house is making me really, really happy but I have to act like I'm sorry for their inconveniences :) I just love when they're here so much!!
I gave a talk in church this week about family history, which is a different topic than I've ever been assigned. It was fun to put together and research for. On Saturday we left Asher home with the Boones and went to clean the church with the older three. It was really, really fun and whenever that happens I can't help but think, "Man, this is where we'll be in two years." I love Asher's stage right now so much. To think that in two years, he'll be where Camden is and that will be my youngest kiddo, that's just wild. They're so much fun. I did a couple writing jobs for a fun client with Comma this week and loved that, and Michael had a full day study club meeting on Friday.
Cousin time is the best time :)
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My little egg washer. Bennett loves to help in the kitchen.
We are on a total roll kick right now.
These boys just eat and I've turned to solid carbs to get us by. |
Why We Need Family History Now More Than Ever
Good morning! My name is Maddie Daetwyler, we are the family with four boys in the back with the crawling baby who doesn’t stay in the back. Our New Year’s resolution as a family was to be on time for church each week this year so I think sharing that publicly is going to do a number for the accountability factor. But also please know, that we kind of unofficially count the opening song as on time, so keep that in mind. Brother Johnson usually sits near us back there and after catching us on what must have been a couple good weeks in a row he has dubbed us “The Calm Family” but now I think he’s continuing with the nickname ironically, or just kindly doesn’t want to take it away. We’re really grateful to be in the Spring Park ward full of quite a few other families full of boys. We’ve enjoyed getting to know you.
My husband is Michael, we moved here for him to join an oral surgery practice in July of 2020 and things have thankfully gone well so we’re here for the long term. We met each other in the summer of 2010 when we both studied at the BYU Jerusalem Center. We had 80 people in our group that summer and 16 people married each other, so, the odds were in our favor. Also that first moment we met in the Salt Lake airport before Jerusalem seemed to set the tone for us – Michael had a bag that was over the airline weight limit, and even though the Jerusalem Center faculty had told us we could only have one carry on I noticed his struggle and told him he should just fill up his empty backpack and bring on two carry ons so that his bigger bag would be under the weight limit, and I told him BYU’s one carry on rule was just silly. My mom watched this interaction go down and the first words Michael’s future mother-in-law ever spoke to him were, “Now don’t you let this girl corrupt you.” The rest is history. We dated a couple years while he finished microbiology at BYU and I finished in Communications, and then I worked in event planning in Provo, then we moved to Indiana where Michael is from, for 4 years of dental school for him and I worked in healthcare marketing. We had our oldest Westin, there, then moved to Fresno, California for Michael’s four-year residency program in oral surgery. There we had Bennett and Camden, then moved to Fort Collins during the pandemic and soon had our baby, Asher. Last month marked the first night that all four of my children slept through the night. Then later that week we brought home a puppy. So, I guess we like to be busy and we know we’re in the thick of things but we know it’s really great too.
Brother Kropp mentioned when I bore my testimony last month that he realized they haven’t asked me to speak. I don’t know if you want to take that as a warning or not, I’m just throwing it out there. But he wanted me to speak about family history, and sent me a blog post from Family Search titled “We Need Family History Now More Than Ever.”
I’m guessing a few of you have already considered tuning out now because you identify as someone who doesn’t do family history. It can sometimes be something we just feel like we do or don’t do. But I want to focus today on how it’s not only important for all of us, but can be approachable for all of us, because we can make family history efforts look however they should for us personally.
In that blog post I mentioned about family history mattering now more than ever, it says, “Knowing, recording, and preserving your family history directly impacts you, your family, and even future generations of people you may never know.” So I think those three efforts, knowing, recording, preserving, can and should look different for each of us. When I was first assigned this topic I thought that this would be better given to someone who is more active in family history, has dedicated more time to it, and feels like it is one of their hobbies. I am barely keeping up with my living family, I’ll be the first to admit. But that’s many of us, and that doesn’t mean there’s not something all of us can do to better connect to our family, past and present. So I want to spend time thinking about how each of us, no matter our relationship with family history, can know, record, and preserve memories.
Knowing
When considering the importance of knowing our family history, Marcus Garvey said, “A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.”
The Family Search post continues with outlining the ways knowing family history can help families and children feel an increase in connection, compassion, resilience, selflessness, self-worth, and knowing our core identity. In that list, resilience in particular stood out to me because I think we’re seeing an increased need to deliberately help to develop resilience in ourselves and in children.
Bruce Feiler, in an article for the New York Times, summarizes a study about the resilience of children. He said, “the more children knew about their family’s history, the stronger their sense of control over their lives, the higher their self-esteem and the more successfully they believed their families functioned. [It] turned out to be the best single predictor of children’s emotional health and happiness.”
I already know that my boys love to hear stories from when Michael and I were little. They have a favorite that I have to repeat often, the story of when my family accidentally left me in a bookstore in a mall when I was 5 years old – we were with a few other families and they each thought I left with the other group. When they met back up with each other and realized I wasn’t with them, my brother who is 7 years older than me took off sprinting to the bookstore and I can vividly remember seeing him come in and feeling such relief that my family had found me. I know this is not to be compared with Carrie Gregory’s story she recently shared about being swept down a river alone… while she was working out a river rescue my solo time was spent reading a book about unicorns, and I remember my dad even bought it for me because he felt bad about leaving me. But it wasn’t fun to be alone, wondering where my family was or wondering how I’d find them. But the feeling I felt when my brother found me first was a really sweet relief that I can only imagine is just a glimpse of how our family members who have passed on feel when we find their stories or do their work in the temple. So apart from telling stories from my own past or my kids own past to them, I am going to make more of an effort to click through the memories on my Family Search tree with my boys, showing them pictures of people they’ve never met and how they’re connected. There is a value in helping them know their family and their history.
As an example, just a couple weeks ago Westin, my 8-year-old, asked me if he ever had a family member who had served in a war. I told him my Grandpa served in WWII and my Great-Uncle served in that war as well, and that I thought he did something on flight missions. When I started working on preparing for this talk, I realized I could put in a little effort to tell and show Westin a little more than that. I showed him a few pictures of both of those men on Family Search, and showed him how he was connected to them. I asked my dad to remind me more about his Uncle’s work in the war and he told me about his missions as a tailgunner. He was required to fly 30 missions, but chose to fly 3 more to be with some friends as they flew their last few missions. When the bombs would sometimes get stuck he would crawl back in the plane and kick them out himself. I visited this man many times in my life but only had a vague knowledge of this huge stage of his life. Putting in a little extra effort to answer Westin’s questions reminded me of the importance of keeping people’s legacies alive, and helping build connections through generations.
Recording
Beyond just knowing our family history, recording it is a way to help memories continue to bless other people and family members. I went to Family Search again while preparing this talk with the goal to just click through memories and try to find something new I could learn about a family member. My great-grandmother, Cleo Hinckley, is cemented in my mind as a sweet and quiet and very old woman. This is because I only saw her about once a year or so from the time she was 97 until she died a month before turning 112. It makes sense that there would be much, much, much that I do not know about her but until preparing this talk I had never spent time looking through the memories and photos recorded about her in Family Search. I found some tributes to her written by her children where they said they remembered her steady supply of cinnamon toast and frequent eskimo kisses. My three-year-old Camden is just learning the fun of eskimo and butterfly kisses, and I admittedly have not given my kids as much cinnamon toast as I should. Now I’m going to be reminded of her with both of those things, where before they would have no connection to family in my mind. Motherhood can be lonely at times, although the alone time is rare. It’s very mystifying. But an when you know of connections to the mothers before you and the mothers before them, there becomes a sense of community even with loved ones who aren’t here anymore. I kept clicking through memories about this great-grandma, and read about her losing a farm in the depression, nursing children through scarlet fevers without antibiotics, and even read a memory my mom had written about shelling peas with her on her porch. Family Search offers a place to record memories that can live on through generations and help us stay connected to our family tree. We probably all have something we could upload, a picture or a memory, that would offer a lasting memory that someone else could someday come across for maybe the first time.
Preserving
Knowing and recording family history is our important start, and then preserving continues those efforts. Preserving family history might initially give you thoughts of caring for old yellowed pages or trying to restore faded photographs. But those thoughts can leave us feeling unqualified to preserve family history, when really there are things we can all do to preserve in our own way. Just like uploading memories to family search, like I mentioned. Another way I think of preserving is sharing. Without passing on family history to my children, pieces of that history can literally become lost. One way I preserve memories of my own family is on each Sunday night when I keep a family journal on a personal blog, full of the pictures from the week, or the things my kids said, or just the things we did together. There is such a sweetness to our ordinary life that I know can easily be lost or forgotten when we let it. It doesn’t always feel sweet… which is exactly why I want reminders of just how sweet it is. So I have weekly blog posts through the past 13 years that someday my kids can scroll through and remember their childhood through my words and pictures and even see my life before I knew them. This ritual has become sacred to me. I have smiled so many times when reading old posts and remembering something my kids said or did that I wouldn’t have remembered otherwise.
We all have different ways of coming to know family history, recording it, and preserving it, but each of those efforts are meaningful. I want to invite you to ponder what that looks like for you. It will be so different for each of us and that’s a good thing.
In the LDS Gospel Topics essay about Family History it says that beyond family history connecting us to ancestors, “Family history can also strengthen our relationships with our living family members. As we share discoveries, stories, photographs, and other memories, we establish family bonds and strengthen the love between our family members. In this sense, family history is much more than just researching names, dates, and places.”
In a TED talk titled, Everything You Think You Know about Addiction Is Wrong, a British journalist named Johann Hari teaches that the opposite of addiction is not sobriety, it is connection. Connecting with members of our family past and present by learning their history fills an innate need in each one of us.
I have a strong testimony of the way that family who has gone before us are still cheering us on. Some of the most special moments of my life are with my sweet grandmas, both before and after their passing. I know they are raising my children with me in the ways that they can, and I absolutely know they are still living and we will be together again.
Our purpose on this earth is to love each other, and help each other home. Connecting with our families, those who have passed and those who are here, is a way to truly increase our love and bring us closer to Christ as we become closer to each other. The things we do to know, record, and preserve our history are lasting efforts with importance that I don’t think we can even fully comprehend, but that we can feel as we just put in the efforts that we can.
