Lesson 2-17 "Keeping Family History Records"

Judging by the title alone, this seems an odd lesson to put in the young women's manual. How important is it to threaten the earth be smitten with a curse if young women fail to do their genealogy or complete pedigree charts? Since when are the teenage girls of a family the keepers of its official family history records? (And how different would the Book of Mormon have been if that had been true in 600 BC - 900 AD?).

Like the journals lesson, this one cries out to be brought into the current century. Scrap the paper-and-pencil "blank pedigree chart" and "family group sheet" stuff, and get thee over to Russell M. Nelson's talk from Conference, "Generations Linked in Love." And, if you're not the family history specialist in your ward, get that person's carcass into your class for a workshop/inservice lesson/demo, pronto. The new LDS Family Search is amazing. It cannot fail to inspire. No one's spirit of Elijah should be deadened by a mind-numbing walk-through of a printed pedigree chart, ever, ever again (yawn). End of story.

Just as an aside, at that same conference I mentioned last time at Yale University, I went to a really interesting session about the ethics of digital archives (Family Search is one, of sorts). One of the papers concerned a non-LDS researcher who had made scholarly use of the Family Search database in her historical research project, but she wasn't entirely comfortable with it as a source for scholarly research, because, as she put it, of its intrinsic missionary focus and its "heteronormativity." I often wonder about that too; give that idealized hope for a "single human family tree" a couple of generations of Generation X-ers and Generation Y-ers and unions of legalized same-sex marriage, and that single family tree will begin to get very, very complicated. Even in my own extended family, we've got blood-parents, adoptive parents, step parents, temple sealings that cross some of those lines but not others... who really belongs to whom? All well and good to just hope that if we do as much temple work and sealings as possible that the whole human family will more or less be glued together, but even heteronormative families, to use the term my scholar friend did, are not a single six-link paper chain as illustrated in the lesson, and when the legal realities of international adoptions, surrogacy, egg/sperm donors, marriages, divorces, civil unions, partnerships, and who knows what else are all thrown in, I'm not sure if the chain analogy is all that helpful anymore. Maybe more like a "web of humanity" instead of a "tree" or "chain." I know that for some latter-day saints, those legal realities send them scurrying for picket signs and petitions to outlaw all those pesky new legal family structures, but not me. I like webs. I like them dense and complicated. You catch more flies that way, and as for me, I think that's what the Lord intends--that no one be unconnected, unloved or unclaimed. The gender, politics, or religious affiliation of the "claimer" is not more important, I'll warrant, in the eternal scheme of things, than the lived, loved reality of the act of claiming. That's my take on it, anyway.

A friend of mine told me an amazing story. She is a health care professional and before she got married she spent some time overseas volunteering her services in a post-Soviet orphanage. She fell in love with and hoped to adopt one particular disabled girl, who could only crawl at age 4. She went through all the paperwork and got donations for the girl's medical care and flights and permissions. She spent her meager single-person's salary on a closet of adorable clothes and a well-outfitted child's room in her small apartment. She dreamed and lived nothing else for a year. She went back to the country to pick her up, and tracked down the birth parents for their signatures, and in the end--although the birth mother had had no contact with that child since she was a few months old--the mother declined to sign the papers, and my friend returned to the States alone. She has no idea what happened, although she tried to keep in touch with the girl. No Hollywood ending.

My son tore his favorite sweats a couple of months ago. He caught the pocket on a doorknob or something, and a big Rrrrripp sound, and a huge tear in the fabric. He didn't ask me to sew them, although I probably could have gotten out the old machine and made a decent repair. Instead, he sewed them himself with needle and thread, from the outside of the pants instead of from the inside, with big uneven stitches. They're still his favorite sweats.

In other words, families get broken. There are legal and social and cultural and genetic links going all different directions, or being dead ends, or hanging loose or unraveling. And we try to do our best to stitch them back up, with our big uneven stitches. And God's grace and mercy does the rest. On that hangs all my faith. The brokenness is real, and so is the mercy; keeping records is a candle in the wind. It might be all we can do, given our messy human reality, but with God's grace, it just might be enough.