lawrence’s turn

May 14, 2013

Today is a banner day. Today my sweetie is going to the temple to perform the ordinances for my great-grandfather. This man, Lawrence Saylor, died in 1918 of a brain tumer while his wife, Sallie, was pregnant with their ninth child. Sallie was the first person I ever found in my father’s family over a year ago when I started my genealogy research. I immediately fell in love with Sallie and have branched almost all my research off of her. She raised seven boys and one daughter without her husband (their oldest child, a daughter, was married at sixteen and out of the house before Lawrence died) with lots of laughter and hard work. She took in washing and mending and cleaned houses for years to support her large family.

Sallie lived for thirty years without her husband. I am so in love with and incredibly dependent on my sweetie that the thought of being without him for any length of time much less thirty years brings me great pain. All of Sallie’s and Lawrence’s children are dead except for that youngest child who was born after her father died. I found her thanks to the magic of the internet and called her up one day back in April 2012. I asked her all about Sallie. She didn’t have any idea who I was because my father left home as a boy and didn’t have much contact with his family after that, but she was still willing to talk to me and share stories of Sallie which is probably why I love Sallie so much – she is one of the few people in this whole line of ancestors that I know anything about.

And now her husband, Lawrence, will have the opportunity to make covenants with his Heavenly Father. I hope he accepts them and that his family will be able to be united forever.

What a privilege this family history experience is!