Saints Volume I The Standard of Truth

The Standard of Truth: 1815–1846 by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is a very interesting and very readable history of the early days of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day-Saints. I have read Ivan Barrett’s “Joseph Smith and the Restoration” a few times (I love that book!,) but still there were many history stories that I hadn’t heard before. It made the history so personal and interesting. I am grateful for those who spent many hours researching, preparing, and writing this book. I have to admit that I was disturbed by some of the accounts and stories. But overall, it is a faith-building, informative, and well-documented history of the restoration of the gospel of Jesus Christ on the earth.



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November's Soups

As I wrote last month, I am trying to make a different soup each week for four months.  Here are November's soups with links to the recipes.

Creamy Potato Bacon Soup (this has such delicious flavor!)

Turkey Noodle Soup  I always make this soup after Thanksgiving using the turkey carcass.

Wisconsin Cheese and Potato Soup   Kristen is coming to visit next week.  She is from Wisconsin, and makes this soup very often as her family loves it.  I'm hoping she will make it for us while she is here.

White Chicken Tortilla Soup  Also one of Kristen's delicious recipes

Meet the Mia Maids

We had a fun Mia Maid class activity where we set up a white board, had each girl sit in front of it, then everyone else wrote on the board attributes they love about that girl.  We will have an activity where we show a slideshow of the pictures we took. They haven't seen their boards yet.  So meet my wonderful Mia Maids:

Abby

Kristen

Katelin

Anaya

Emma- our Mia Miad President

Kandice

Three of the girls weren't there, but we did a board for each of them, too.

Corie

Eliza

Angelina

I love these precious girls!

Personal Progress: Good Works

For my Good Works value project,  I did family history work.  That included finding names with ordinances that needed to be done and doing temple work for these relatives.  It also included enlisting the help of many family members to help in getting the ordinances done.  Many accepted that challenge.  I spent a lot of time preparing cards to send out to people, always including self-addressed, stamped envelopes for them to mail the completed cards back to me.  

  Most prominent was the work of Patty and Hal Mickelsen, my sister.  About the time I started the project in earnest, they were called on a mission to the Hilo, Hawaii temple where they served for a year.  During that time, they had the opportunity to do many saving ordinances for our family members.  They were so faithful at completing the work and sending back the cards.  

Others that have helped:  Ken does by far the most (he was baptized 125 times one day!), Kristen, Jared, and Brielle Mackrory, Shonna and Blake Cameron, Michelle and Brian Prince, Nan and Clark Hinton, Joan, Whitney and Tom Morris, Pam and Roger Stratford, Mark Hinton, Jim and Leslie Hinton, , John and Cindy Gabrielsen, Rick and Sherrie Hinton, Don and Ada Hinton, and many children and other relatives of the above, including Micole and Sean Hinton and Ali and Justin Allen. Also, the young women of my ward have helped with the baptisms, as well as a young adult young woman in our ward, who loves to do the baptisms.  Oh man, I hope I haven't forgotten anyone.  I am so grateful to each and every one.  It is impossible to say when this project is complete as it is ongoing, something I work on almost every single day.  And I will probably continue to do so for the rest of my life.  I love doing family history work.  A couple of weeks ago, I counted the cards that we have completed.  There were 675.  Since that count and since I wrote up the project in my personal progress book, we have accumulated over 100 more cards (Patty sent a batch, and Ken and I both have done a lot of Initiatory ordinances.)  I need to explain that there are far more endowment ordinances than we can do, so I share a lot of those with the temple system.  So, sometimes a completed card is just the baptism, confirmation, and initiatory ordinance.  It has been a joy to be part of doing these essential ordinances for our forbears.

Completed ordinance cards

The work has been/ is being done in many temples.

An impressive stack of completed ordinance cards.  675 to be exact.

I keep the cards separated in envelopes by what ordinance needs to be done next.  You may notice one envelope marked "Sharing Box at the Temple"  This is a great idea in theory- you put up to 10 cards in your stake's box.  Then stake members can help you by taking a card and doing the work.  But it hasn't been too helpful to us.  There are so many cards in our stake's box, and few have been done from there.  I have to admit, it is a huge disappointment to me.  I so looked forward to the completion of the cabinet that holds the boxes.  But it hasn't done what I hoped.  It was after a few weeks of having it that I started sharing endowments with the temple system.

This has been a great project for me, and continues to be.  If you would like to help by doing ordinances, your help would be very much appreciated.  Right now, we are pretty caught up on baptisms, confirmations, and initiatories, but need help with endowments and sealings- especially endowments.  I will send you however many you would like.  Together, we can help a lot of our ancestors in work they cannot do for themselves.

Hinton Sibling Reunion

October 11-14th we hosted the Hinton Sibling Reunion.  All attended excepted Clark and Nan.  Nan's family had a reunion at the same time that they attended.  The picture below doesn't show Mark Grant, as he got sick during the reunion and this picture was taken on the last day.

Thursday  

We gathered on Thursday night at our house where we hosted a lasagna dinner.  After dinner, Rick was in charge of a Rook tournament.  Rook is an important Hinton tradition.

Don won 1st place, and Jim and I tied for 2nd.  It was a very proud moment!! I may have celebrated loudly!!

Friday

Out of towners bunked with in- towners for the night.  We all met at IHOP for breakfast.

I ordered this delicious spinach/mushroom omelet.  If you go there, you should order it.  It was so good.  I had it many years ago in a SLC IHOP and have dreamed about it since!  I was so happy it was still on the menu.

After breakfast, we headed to a chapel in Hurricane where we met a Hinton cousin- Wayne (Kendall) Hinton from Cedar.  Wayne is an historian extraordinaire.  He has done history work for the church and is very sharp.  He gave a very interesting presentation on the Washington county CCC camps and the history of those.

After Wayne's presentation, we drove to Virgin where we viewed the property that John Nock Hinton owned.  It is a beautiful setting.  But the Virgin river runs right through it (where you see the row of trees) and more than once the John Nock Hinton family was flooded out.  So they resettled in Hurricane.  It is through John Nock Hinton that all of the southern Utah Hintons come.  A humble carpenter, immigrant from England, left quite a legacy and posterity.

We then walked up to the Virgin town square.  They have done a nice job of renovating the town square and old jailhouse.

They have erected a monument honoring the early settlers of Virgin.

You can see John Nock Hinton and his wife, Emma Spendlove.  Then their son John Maurice Hinton and his wife, Nancy Stanworth.

We then drove to Hurricane Subway shop and purchased sandwiches for our picnic.  I had previously purchased chips, grapes and treats.  We enjoyed a nice picnic in Hurricane's newest park.  It was a lovely setting by Grandpa's Pond.

After we ate, each family reported on how they did during the last year on family history work.  Each sibling is assigned one of the eight family lines to work on.  Ken's report was most impressive until Jim reported.  He gave each of us a book he wrote during this last year about our ancestors.  That Jim!

That evening, we had a progressive dinner.  We started with appetizers at Mark and Kathy's.

This was the first time I had been in Mark and Kathy's beautiful home.

Then we went to Lorene's for salad.

I forgot to take pictures of the main dish and the dessert.  We had the main dish at Ada's.  She made Café Rio Pork burritos with all of the trimmings.  It was delicious.  We served dessert at our house:  Cheesecake from Costco with fresh strawberries and blueberry pie filling.
Don shared a presentation with us on:

We fit pretty comfortably in our basement.

It was a very interesting presentation as we see how the Lord is preparing China, and all of Asia for the gospel.

Jim, Ken's oldest brother, is a master at family trivia games.  He keeps detailed records and draws from those to create fun games.  After the presentation and dessert, Jim conducted a trivia quiz, consisting of questions about family history as well as general trivia..  This time, he just read a question and let us raise our hands to answer. I was particularly proud that I was the first to answer the questions on Merlin Olson. It may have been the most fun part of the whole reunion.  As a result of a question, Don shared an embarrassing moment from his childhood when, on stage, he forgot the poem he was reciting. He said he stood there on stage, saying to himself, "Dang!  My head is so full of poems nothing else is ever gonna fit in there."   That prompted Jim to share a similar story from his childhood about when he and Dave did a cowboy song number in cowboy costumes on stick horses for a community event when they were little. It went fine, but unfortunately his school teacher attended the event and the next day asked Jim for an encore performance that did not go so well.   It had us all laughing so hard.  I think we can all relate, as most of us have had such embarrassing moments.  It was fun and a highlight of the reunion for me.

Saturday

We started Saturday with a temple session.  It was so nice to be all together in the temple.  After the 10:00 session, we went downstairs to the cafeteria.  Because Don is a member of the temple presidency, we had a very delicious dinner in the president's dining room in the cafeteria.  We could choose between salmon and beef.  I had the salmon and have since been all over the internet trying to find a recipe that compares to that sweet glazed salmon.  

We then came to our house for napping, visiting, game playing for the afternoon.  We had leftovers for dinner.

Then we held our business meeting.

We then went to a play in downtown St. George at the historic Electric theater.  Carolyn Murset, a family friend, put on a one-woman play about her grandmother.  It was really well done.

Carolyn is very talented.

Sunday

  We attended Lorene's ward in Washington because they met at 9:00 am.  After church, we met back at Lorene's for lunch: sandwiches, potato salad, chips, etc and more visiting until we had to break up for the travelers to leave.

It was a wonderful reunion.  We are grateful everyone is willing to make the effort to attend each year. We cherish our moments together.