Week 4 - Invite to Dinner - Lamingtons

Week 4 is here and the prompt this week is Invite to Dinner.
Which ancestor would you most want to invite to dinner?  Is there a story of a memorable dinner with an ancestor, or is there a special recipe that's been handed down?

I decided to go with the handed down recipe.

It hasn't been handed down far yet.  It came from my Grandma Edwards.  She was always baking.  Whenever we went to Grandma's house, we were guaranteed to have something freshly baked sitting there for us.  Butterhorns, sugar cookies, pie, or her classic Lamingtons.

Her lamingtons were the stuff of dreams.  I tease my kids all the time that when something tastes good, I ask them how it is made and when they give their answer, I tell them that they are wrong, and that it is made by fairies scooping up rainbows.  They might be tired of this particular joke, but it almost fits here.  These taste like fairies scooped them from rainbows.

So what is a lamington?

It is an Australian dessert that is essentially a dense cake cut into squares, dipped in chocolate and then rolled in shredded coconut.

Here is the recipe:

3 Eggs
1 1/4 cup flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1 cup sugar
1 Tbsp butter
1/2 cup boiling water

Beat eggs for 15 minutes, add sugar, flour, bakign powder, then butter and boiling water.
Bake 25 minutes at 350 degrees.
When cold, cut into squares, roll in runny chocolate icing and roll in coconut.

They really are my favorite dessert.  Now that Grandma has passed away, I don't get to go over and enjoy her baking anymore.
My wife now makes these every year for my birthday.
Any family function, these are guaranteed to be there kind of as a memorium for Grandma.

Week 3 - Longevity - The Chown Line

The prompt for this week is Longevity.  The intent was to explore the oldest person in your tree, someone it took you the longest to find or something along those lines.

I decided to go about it a little different.

I thought I would talk about the line on my family tree, that my Grandpa Edwards spent the longest or most amount of time on.

The Chown family.

By an agreed upon decision, my grandpa and his sister split up which lines in our family tree they would each work on.  This way there was no stepping on toes, disagreements, etc and they each worked on their agreed upon line.  One of the lines my grandpa got was the Chown line.

My great-grandmother Edwards was Irene Gladys Elizabeth Chown.  She was born in Binalong, Australia on the 19th of April 1898.  She died on the 28th of December 1985 in Taber, Alberta.

I remember my Great-Grandma Edwards.  I was 7 when she passed away, but I remember spending time with her and I remember her funeral.  It was the first funeral I ever went to.  She was an amazing lady who defined selflessness.  

Her parents were Samuel and Caroline Chown.  

Samuels parents were Alfred and Lucy Chown.  Alfred was the lucky one in my family that was convicted of larceny on the 9th of January 1846 in Dorset County, England.  He was sentenced to 3 months imprisonment.  His wife, Lucy Lane, and he were married a year later, February 7th, 1847 in Sixpenny Handley, Dorset, England.  

They and their children went to Australia aboard the Emigrant in 1849. 

I could go on and on about the Chown family and my ancestors.  Lots of things to be said here.  Maybe that is where the theme Longevity will play in.

Grandpa dedicated countless hours researching this line and to his credit found out a lot about the Chown family.

He told me before he died that he had made contact with someone who traced the Chowns out of France into England a few centuries ago, but we never were able to make the connection to the Chowns that I am related to, that lived in Berwick, Wiltshire.

Maybe one day we will find that connection.  I sincerely hope so. 

Week 2 - Favorite Photo - Grandpa Ray

This is a tricky challenge.  I have a few favorite photos and for different reasons.

Here is the first one.  Honestly this is one of my favorite photos ever.  I thought for a while that I had lost it and was quite upset and tried to recover it from a variety of places.  Then inspiration struck and I saw that I had saved it on Facebook.  Social Media to the rescue!
This is my grandpa Ray Percy Edwards and myself fishing for salmon, halibut and other rockfish off the coast of Port Hardy, BC.  It was the summer of 2012 and the last time that grandpa came with my Dad and I fishing on the ocean.  We had a great week and caught a lot of fish.

My grandpa was one of the most important people in my life.  Every minute spent with him was valuable.  As I grew more interested in genealogy, I would spend more time with him, asking questions and just listening to his stories.  In April, 2017, I was in the Boston Airport waiting for my flight back home, when my sister called me on my cell.  Immediately I knew something was wrong.  My grandpa had just moved out of his longterm house to move into a home.  He had been there less than a month and had had a stroke and had bleeding on the brain.  The prognosis was that he wouldn't last more than a couple of hours.  Sobbing I texted my aunt, Shauna, who was sitting with him, to ask her to let him know how much he meant to me and my love for him. 
I caught my flight and at 2 am arrived home.  I texted my wife to let her know to not expect me and I went directly to the hospital, amazed that he was still holding on.  To be able to see him again, really comforted me.  I didn't realize how much I needed that. 
I spent most of the next two days and nights sitting in the hospital with a couple of cousins and all of my aunts.  (My father was trying to fly back from Moldova in time for the funeral).  We told stories, laughed, cried and rejoiced at the life Grandpa lived.  What was really great, was we all had a story to share that was unique to us, that no one else knew.  There was a lot of laughter.  It felt like Grandpa was holding on, just to hear us talk about him. 
A lot of prayers were said those two days.  I went over after supper the one night, and everyone was singing gospel hymns.  I sat down, joined in and never felt a stronger Spirit.  There were a lot of people and spirits in that room.  And a lot of tears.  We sang for a couple of hours.  I went home late that night and awoke to the news that he had passed away early that morning.
I miss Grandpa every day.  But the time I spent with him was so valuable, so precious to me, that I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world.

In terms of genealogical significance, here is another photo that I love.  Ray Percy Edwards and Verla Jensen on their wedding day, November 11, 1953.  They were married in Cardston at the LDS temple there.  Not sure who has the original photo anymore, I got this copy from Chantelle Froc, my cousin.

This is definitely going to be a challenge to keep up each week.  I'm glad for the email prompts I'm getting to keep me focused.

How I got started...

I wasn't late to the genealogy world by most standards.  But later than I should have been.
I grew up thinking and believing that family history was something that you did when you retired and had time for it.  No one else needed to.  Despite constant pressures, talks, promptings, I never felt the need.
In the Winter of 2014, our Stake Presidency gave a challenge to all the youth in the Stake to prepare a name to take to the temple for the Stake Temple Day.  I thought this was a great idea and fully endorsed it, thinking I wasn't a youth, I was a youth leader and exempt.  Then I learnt that the challenge included youth leaders as well.
I jumped in with both feet.  I created my account at www.familysearch.org and was searching all I could.  I knew a lot had been done in my family by my grandpa, but thought I could find one.  Instead, I found nothing for over a month.  No matter what I did, where I looked, I was stumped.  But I did learn the ins and outs of Family Search.
I was told I should sit down with Grandpa and ask for an area to start.  I did, and he told me he couldn't find a distant grandfather on the Chown (His mother's) line.  I went home, did a Google search and within minutes found him and hundreds of other names.
Thus began an obsession according to my wife, a hobby if you ask me and a worthwhile way to spend time.
Its been only 4 years.  I've spent countless hours doing research.  I've been able to help others as well.
I am by no means an expert, but I sure have fun doing it.

This blog was started as part of the #52Ancestor challenge by Amy Johnson Crow.
If you haven't yet signed up for it, I highly suggest you do.