Next stop: Brigham City and the Forsgren Reunion

     The whole focus of my year since about February has been the Forsgren Reunion August 7, 2010.  These are held only every two years, but this time I had to make good on some promises I have been trying to bring to pass for the last 8 years.    ( You know the old wisdom:  "If you want a job done do it yourself."  I delegated out this job to three different people, none of whom ever did anything with the assignment).   The first promise was to make sure that 1 broken headstone and 5 buried ones were reset at the Brigham City Cemetery.   Bott Monument did a wonderful job of doing just that (though it took even them nearly a year!)  Sooooo - now my grandmother Frieda's sisters and brothers that died at young ages or in infancy are up above ground again and there to greet you if you ever go to Section B of the cemetery.  And little Charles P. Lee's headstone has been mended and set so that the cemetery mowers won't damage it further.

The five small stones, raised & reset.   They were completely buried for many years.

(Twins Velate & Violet, Cornelius, Hyrum, Josephine, Eugene and Adolph - children of Adolph Peter Forsgren)

     The second promise to fulfill was an effort to get all the Forsgren papers into some sort of on-line format so that more people could benefit from all the knowledge stored at MY house.   Instead of creating I finally opted to create blogs for each of the three convert children of Johan Olof Forsgren and their descendants.   I have spent a LOT of time on that project as well as uploading as many cemetery photos as possible to the findagrave.com website and putting all the family photos on Flickr.  As you can imagine all this is an enormous task and I don't pretend to be near finished.   But at least I have given it a good starting effort.  Click on the links to the right of the blog to visit these other sites.

     The reward for my efforts is for others to "google" a name and then have my blogs come up to reward them with an opportunity to learn more about their particular ancestor.  Two righter/journalists have found the blogs and are using them in their own writings and investigations.   It is an exciting thing to see the blogs actually fulfill what they were meant to do.

     The third major task was updating the "Forsgren Scrolls" - the list of all known descendants of the three Forsgren siblings.  Colleen and Nana will testify that I took up a lot time and counter space working on these scrolls at their homes as we visited prior to the reunion.  We are into the 8th generation on some of these lines.   If I had had as much data as I would like to have had then the building would not have been able to accommodate the life-size descendancy chart:

The top three rows of paper are the Peter Forsgren descendants, the bottom sheet holds the names of descendants of John Erik Forsgren.  Christina Erika's sheets are clear to the left.

My brain and my  body are really glad it is all over!   Still plenty to do at home, but that can be sandwiched in.