Suddenly these stories are in living color!

It seems strange; none of us are Pollards, who have Joseph and Mary Ann as our progenitors. Their sons did not survive to found families while their seven daughters did. And those families have moved about. But when a few of us got together today in Salt Lake City we met a likable group.

Thank you James Backman for your forethought. Often  such an event as a bi-centennial slips right past, as if it hasn't taken 200 years to come around. This or that item has catches our attention this week or month and we think it must get done, looking away just as a "big" event comes up!

Jim was generous with his comments about my family history work, which I sometimes cannot help thinking where to just put it down and back away. After today though, I wonder how to put it into others' hands, how to make it available to those we haven't gotten together with. Yet.

I am not LDS. I do know however, that in that faith there is a powerful desire to gather. In 1855 it may have been to gather in a desert Zion as much as to gather as eternal families. Family lineage, then, is one means toward that accomplishment.

Famous for my eye-roll, I have had to accept that rash statement: "Oh, I have all that done!" or more frequently, "that's all been done". I beg to differ, I think.

About the going forward. My vision is that through family history I will develop a sense of belonging, and that others will also; a sense of being part of something important. My goal is to show where and how I belong, and with whom. I am in generation five in Joseph Pollard's family, but I want my nephews and nieces to know whence they come, and their children - perhaps especially.

I am nine generations away from the American Revolution. 9? I have nieces whose mother comes from families that were well established in New Spain (now New Mexico) earlier. 10?

I will show as many descendants in the seventh generation as I can, how they trace back to this pioneering family. I will learn all the names of those having the Bishop's Daughters as a 4th Great Grandmother. Seven generations.

Well, back to work then!