Heart Song

My heart is singing this morning! I have made a new friend this weekend even though he is miles from me! I'd better explain or it is going to make people think that I am not being faithful to Brian and that is not true.

Family means everything to me! I love my family, including those I have never met, because they have helped me to become the person that I am today. They have brought me great joy in my life and I love to hug them whenever I can.

So you can understand my joy when I opened up a blog to discover that I had more pictures of some of my grandchildren and an update on each of them. I can't reach through the phone lines or the internet to give each of them a BIG HUG but I sure would love to be able to do so. We do not get to see our family very often but this summer we have been real blessed to have had some of them with us, along with their parents. Our children and grandchildren are a rich blessing in our lives and we love them dearly!

There is another reason that my heart is singing today! The Lord knows how important family is to me. I love learning about them and all the sacrifices that they made so that I could live in a land with so much promise and opportunity. I will always be grateful for their sacrifices, their courage to face the unknown, their strength to endure great challenges, and their choice to come to America.
Two weeks ago, while looking for information on my Lundgren family I ran into some information that suggested that I might have another relative working on our family line. He had left his name and how I could get in touch with him on the web site and so I grabbed the opportunity to do just that. I spoke with him on the phone last night and we compared notes. Some things just didn't seem to be right though and so more research was needed. He called me back this morning to tell me that he had figured thing out. It turns out that our Great-great grandparents had the same names. They were all from Sweden. My great-grandfather and his brother's and sisters were listed under his Great-Great grandparents as their children. Records have become tangled and errors have been made so they need to be corrected. As it turns out, Phillip served as a missionary back in 1969.
His mission took him to Sweden, where he learned the Swedish Language, and culture. He now lives in Sandy, Utah and has offered to meet my children at the Family History Center in Salt Lake City to help them sort through the Swedish records of my family, and to teach them how to read and interpret the Lutheran Church records from Sweden. He said that the records will take us back to the 1600's if rodents, floods or fires did not destroy them. I am way excited to learn more about my family!