My Bingham Family

This fall was a time of family history for me.  Besides working on the Book of Remembrance, I decided it was high time for me to finish up a project I began a few years ago.  My Uncle Carl, mother's  brother had a booklet of a history he had researched and compiled about Mom's grandfather, Calvin Perry Bingham (known as Perry).  He would have been Clara's father.  It was typed and printed up on a dot matrix printer that had faded grey type that wouldn't photo-copy well.  I asked Uncle Carl if I could borrow the history and retype it and get it printed for other family members.

I loved reading about ancestors I knew nothing about as well as my Grandma and Grandpa Young. The saving of files was a challenge as we had a couple of computer crashes, and a new pc and laptop.  The files were strewn between them all.  I finally got to the point when it was mostly done, and then I quit.  This fall when I decided I just had to get this done while Uncle Carl (who is 90 years old and weighs 90 pounds) is still alive.  Then I couldn't find the manuscript.  I searched high and low and knew or hoped I'd find it someday.  Then a few weeks before Christmas, its whereabouts came to me.  I quickly finished it up and got it to the printer. It isn't perfect.  My page numbering was off and I didn't have the whole manuscript on one computer.  Plus there were sheets that were clear enough not to need retyped.  So biting the perfectionist bullet - I did what I had to do to get it in print before Christmas and hand wrote corrections and page numbers. 

Because Grandma Young (Clara) lived until I was grown and married, I was able to know her fairly well.  This history has given me insights into her childhood and home life that I would have never known. I'll share some of them little by little as the blog goes on.

THE MOST MEMORABLE CHRISTMAS GIFT FROM MY DAD (and I got to help) !

Thanks to Gloria (Dad's second wife) and I believe, my mother orchestrating a little bit from heaven, Dad decided to give each of his kids a Book of Remembrance for Christmas this year.  He needed some help getting the information together and asked me to be a helper/liaison for Universal Genealogy Center.
Gloria had decided to give books to her children, and Dad had observed the meetings she had with the representative from the company in St. George.  He asked me to meet with him and see if it looked like something I thought my we would like.  Did it ever!!!
I gave Kevin Steadman the general information for our family and received the assignment to collect all the information for Dad's living posterity.  It was an assignment that was harder than I thought it would be.  My last information had been input on a computer that had crashed. Since then I had changed Family History software, so I had to find and re-enter the data.
To make it more interesting, I had changed to a Macbook (Apple product), so I was learning a new operating system, plus trying to get my software to work on it.  I had a bit of trouble saving the info to a thumb drive and going back and forth between computers.  It was finally pulled together after a couple of different setbacks.
When Kevin brought me sample book for my approval, I was overcome.  It was eight inches tall!  He said because all the family lines were pioneer lines with lots and lots of posterity, there was no family temple work to be done for the dead.  Just think!!! I have been feeling the hovering cloud of guilt every time we had a talk on doing temple work for your own ancestors.  That is not to say there isn't a LOT of things to do.  Updating my parents siblings info to begin with.
And so many, many ancestors to learn about.  There was one named Comyn the Red that Christian randomly saw.  He wanted to know why he was called The Red.  I googled him and up came tons of Scot history.  It was impressive.
We received CD's for each of the kids with all the info on it. 
WE WERE ALL SO THRILLED!