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Family Tree TuesdayZ | Times of Struggle


My Journaling:

I’m going to be very vulnerable today and share a particular hard time in my life, a definite time of struggle. I’ve talked about this with others, but I don’t believe that I have ever written it down, so maybe its time. This memory is definitely a time when I didn’t know if I would make it through, but I did and I’m still here and I’m so grateful that I am.

The teen years are tough for everyone. It’s a time where you are trying to figure out who you are and what you want out of life. Unfortunately, when you mix that with everyone else’s emotions and feelings, it becomes a mess. When I was in seventh and eighth grades, I experienced an extreme amount of bullying and torment from my classmates. It was everyday and as I didn’t grow up with great communication in my home, I didn’t know how to talk about it and I kept most of it inside. I felt very trapped and very, very lonely. I definitely became a “victim” and I had that total mentality. It took a toll on my self-esteem that has lasted my whole life (I’m working on it, but its still hard to get past and I still struggle with it).

In seventh grade, I got a perm and my hair was big and curly and it was a mess and I think that is why I became known as “the rat” to my classmates. I come from a very small town where there was no middle school/jr. high and so our high school hosted 7th-12th grades. Coming into a new school is never easy, but when you come into the school and your first week you are made fun of not only by students of your own age, but all ages, including the seniors at the school, it is very devastating to your confidence and self-esteem. It felt like I could never have any relief at all, from school and extra-curricular activities, I was tormented constantly. I would go home and just go into my room and shut the door and cry. I didn’t talk to anyone for the longest time. I shut myself off from the world. I would do my homework and go to church and church activities and if I was at home, I was in my room reading and getting lost in someone else’s problems rather than my own. I know that I became more and more depressed everyday. I don’t know the date or even an approximate time but somewhere in that time period, I started thinking of killing myself. I just wanted some kind of relief and I began to think that since no one would even be sad that I was gone, that maybe it was the right thing to do. I’m sure that I was really oblivious to people who reached out to me at this time but I had completely shut myself off. I know that I had people who loved me – friends and family and I’m sure some of them knew what was going on, but I didn’t talk about it, so I’m not sure who actually knew. I’m pretty sure that my own parents had no idea. I do know that some people who I thought were my friends, were a part of the bullying (or at least didn’t stop it). But there were a couple of friends (my lifelong friends) that I’m sure were there the whole time, but for a long time I didn’t share my burden.

Anyways, I remember a particular night, where I was home alone (I actually have no idea where my family was) and I began thinking about suicide. It was definitely my all time low moment. I didn’t really even know what I was going to do, but I remember feeling like it was time. And then the phone rang and it was good friend, Beverly. I don’t remember what she said or anything, but I remember leaving the house and going to her home. I remember sitting outside on her driveway and just basically exploding on her, everything that I had been feeling and just everything came out. We cried and I remember just feelings so blessed that Bev just listened and hugged me and cried WITH ME. Things were so much better after that. She stood up for me lots of times and it was just so nice to be able to just talk to her about how I was feeling. The bullying didn’t stop and it was still difficult everyday, but just knowing that I had someone to talk to, helped me get past the suicidal thoughts, I didn’t think about that at all anymore. That was definitely a turning point for me. I still struggled, but a little self-worth came back to me that night – enough to get me through.

It is still so hard for me to get away from playing “the victim” and having self-confidence in my life, but I do feel like I am getting closer as I work towards healing myself. A lot of this time period, is such a blur to me – I remember some moments, but there was a lot that I have completely blocked out. But I do remember how it felt and I hope my children never have to feel that way. I know that I have been able to talk about this experience with my kids when they were struggling and it just is such a blessing to have someone care about you. I hope that we can all look out for people who could use a friend, because it truly means everything to someone who is in need of that – actually, it is everything to everyone, because we all need friends in our lives.

 

This prompt could mean many things, it wouldn’t have to be suicide, just times of struggle. So I hope you will take a moment today to stop and reflect and share your experience in your journal. You never know when someone in your family might need your strength and guidance through the experiences that you have.


I have a journal card for you today. I want you to just write about a time in your life when you struggled, you didn’t know if you would make it, but you won! You are here and you did make it through it – how amazing is that!

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Journal prompts, Journal CardZ, and other ideas
to help you tell YOUR story and discover your family history!

Tuesdays

Filed Under: Blog Series, Family Tree TuesdayZ, Personal Tagged With: experience, family, family tree, journal, journal prompt, life, memories, memory, prompt, story, struggle, struggles, time

Family Tree TuesdayZ | BYU Family History Technology Apps

My daughter has been getting into family history lately and that excites me because that is about the age that I began being interested too. She’s started a project of collecting family stories and I think its going to be great fun to collaborate together and discover more about our genealogy! In this newly-found quest, my daughter found out about a local Family History Fair a few weeks ago and so we went and had a great time learning through some classes. One of the classes that I attended talked about some great family history apps from BYU, that make family history come alive for families! I’m so excited to share these with you today and I hope you will try them out with your families!

The Family History Technology Lab, sponsored by the Department of Computer Science at Brigham Young University, is the gateway to a variety of Family History Web Apps that are free and open to the public and used by hundreds of thousands of people around the world to help them with their family history. To use these apps you will need a username and password from **FamilySearch.org, (so you will need to signup and bring in your genealogy through the site) and then you can dig right in! 

    • RelativeFinder | an app developed by BYU professors and students that connects individuals with famous historical figures, as well as friends and neighbors. It works through the FamilySearch API to identify common ancestors and show how two people are related. It also allows you to create your own groups so you can see how you might be related to a friend or a deceased person or even with people standing next to you by allowing RelativeFinder to use your location!

 

    • Virtual Pedigree | an app that quickly and dynamically navigates your family tree with both expandable and collapsible ancestry as well as descendancy. It uses BYU’s patented Elastic Paper technology to expand the entire tree with a simple single click and drag, whether exploring ancestors or descendants. It works especially well on tablets and smart phones by simply touching and dragging over the tree. You can view and navigate through hundreds of names, up and down the tree in a matter of seconds.

 

    • One Page Genealogy | an app that allows you to construct large pedigree charts with user-defined color and other attributes. It can create a custom tree, allowing 14-16 generations to be placed on a 2-3 foot wide format, something that is not possible with standard tree-charting applications. You can make charts from a tree in FamilySearch or from a Gedcom file.

 

    • Pedigree Pie | an app that provides a graphical pie-shaped representation of ancestors based on countries of origin and allows a user to quickly see what percent English, German, Swedish, etc, they are.

 

    • Descendancy Explorer | an app that members of the LDS church can use to quickly and easily find names of their ancestors that are ready to take to the temple.

 

    • Geneopardy | a game app that is based on the well-known game of Jeopardy. It is great for family gatherings and a fun way for children and adults to get to know their ancestors better!

 

    • Wheel of Family Fortune | a game app that is based on the well-known game of Wheel of Fortune, but with hints and names drawn from your own family tree. A great way to engage family members, old and young, in family history!

 

    • And more to come! So check back to see what other apps are being developed!

 

Aren’t these so much fun! I’m so excited to explore these apps and get my family excited about learning about where they came from and why they are, who they are! So try them out and come back and tell me what you think!

 

** I am a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS or Mormon), which has created FamilySearch. But even if you aren’t a member of my church, please check it out – it is an amazing site that helps families connect with all generations!

 



 

Tuesdays

Filed Under: Blog Series, Family Tree TuesdayZ, Personal Tagged With: apps, family, family history, family tree, game, games, genealogy, names, pedigree, relative, stories, story, tree

Wednesday SayingZ | What’s Your Story

{ This week’s title }
What’s Your Story

dedesmith_whatsyourstory

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Wednesday SayingZI am a collector of quotes/sayings/titles and I am excited to share them with you each Wednesday. I hope they will inspire you and make your day a little better! I am also creating pieces of wordart with these quotes and will be offering them to you as a freebie! Feel free to use them in your scrapbooks or just print them out for wall decor!

Filed Under: Freebies, Wednesday WordZ, WordArt Tagged With: story, title, wordart

Family History TuesdayZ | Special Stories

Journal Prompt: Do you remember any special stories your grandparents told you?

Journal Prompt: Do you remember any special stories your grandparents told you?Journal Prompt: Do you remember any special stories your grandparents told you?



Family History TuesdayZEach Tuesday, I am going to be offering prompts or ideas. If you don’t write in your journal regularly – I am going to encourage you to write just ONCE A WEEK and answer the question/idea that I give on Tuesdays. These ideas hopefully will spark a memory and you will be able to capture that in what you write/record so that it can be left for your children/grandchildren/family/friends. Give as much detail as you can when answering.

Will you do this for me? Will you do this for your families? You can write it down in a journal, you can type it up on a computer or journaling software, you can take a recorder and talk, you can videotape your answers, you can even scrap a page with the journaling. It doesn’t matter how you do this – it’s just important that you do it. The memories, the dates, the information is the only real thing we can leave to our families when we are gone.

Filed Under: Family Tree TuesdayZ Tagged With: grandparents, journal, prompt, special stories, story

Life 2012 | So Interesting!

bethbook1My daughter loves to read. That should come as no surprise to my family since her parents are both read-a-holics. I have really enjoyed seeing Beth come into her love of books. She has her favorites – she’s really into the Rainbow Magic Fairy books and the Magic Treehouse books right now. But she also loves when a new issue of the Friend comes and she basically reads it from cover to cover.

But there is something that she doesn’t enjoy reading as much – Baggie Books. Her school has a reading program where they achieve different levels of reading by bringing books (in ziploc bags) home to read to their families. She gets a new book every weekday to bring home and read. These are small readers that get harder/longer as they level up. Actually Beth is on the higher achievement now and brings home 2 books to read every day. Anyways, she’s never really too enthused by these book choices. She still reads them out loud and does a good job and sometimes she does enjoy some of the stories. But a few weeks ago, she brought home a book that interested her so much. It surprised me a lot – enough for me to stop what I was doing (making dinner) and actually sit down next to her and discuss it.

bethbook2
The name of the book was Telling Stories Through Art and she kept reading it and exclaiming things and showing me the pictures. Almost every paragraph ended with “Wow. That’s so interesting!” It was adorable to hear that coming out of her mouth. I probably shouldn’t have been so surprised that the history and paintings of indians would interest her. Growing up, many of my family vacations were to visit historical sites and indian ruins. It’s something that my Dad really enjoys and I always enjoyed it too. But its also something that I haven’t really shared with my children before. I’ve never really visited with them about historical sites and stuff and obviously its something that I need to remedy. Beth hasn’t stopped talking about the indian carvings and paintings and how she wanted to see some “for real.” I am definitely going to have to do some research and see if there is some places we can visit. How neat to see that Beth is experiencing a new interest in history. I can’t wait to visit some new places with her and I hope this love just grows. I think it will be really fun for her to learn and grow through the history of our country and the history of the people on earth and even the history of the people in the scriptures. I’m excited to share more of this with her!

Filed Under: Life 2012, Personal, Project Life Tagged With: 2012, art, Beth, books, history, indians, interesting, reading, story

Life 2012 | Story@Home Conference

I am so excited to have some time to myself this weekend. Tomorrow night I get to head off on my adventure to the Story@Home Conference. I have been hearing about it for awhile and really wanting to go, but I figured that we wouldn’t have the money to do it or it would just not work out, so I kept it to myself. About a month ago, in a moment of weakness, I commented to Joey how I wished I could go. He looked at me and said, “Why can’t you?” I mentioned the money and other things and he just said, “You should go.” And so I got registered and even though its only an hour away in Salt Lake City and I could drive home at night – I’m lucky enough to have a hotel room for 2 nights. I have a wonderful husband and I’m feeling extremely blessed. The kids are calling it my “Mommy Vacation” and I guess it is. I’m really blessed to have a couple of days to just learn and grow through the conference and have time to think and just hopefully rejuvenate my spirit. I think this is going to be just what I needed to get over the funk I’m in right now.
So all week, I’ve actually stayed away from the computer. I’ve been planning and organizing. Shopping and cleaning and just getting the household ready to have me gone. I realize I’ll only be gone for 2 days, but somehow I will feel better if I feel its all left in control. I just have a couple of things to finish up and get packed and then tomorrow after work, Joey is going to drop me off at the Trax station and I’ll be on my way to my Mommy Vacation. I even got a cut and a few highlights put in my hair today. I’m extremely blessed!

I just have to again say thank you to my wonderful husband. Joey is planning on working from home on Friday so he can get the kids off to school and be there when they return home. I’m sure they are going to have a blast while I’m gone. Joey has been so amazing about this – really wanting me to go and making it work. I just feel really blessed and thankful that I’m going to have this time. Because really – how often does time away happen? Hardly ever…

So, there will be no Challenge this Saturday, but I’ll have something for you next week! I hope you all have a great weekend! I’m sure I’ll have lots to share later on!

Filed Under: Life 2012, Personal, Project Life Tagged With: 2012, conference, story

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I'm a wife, a mom, a blogger, a lover of crafting, and a graphic designer. I believe in living life to the fullest, sharing your heart and talents to enrich the lives of others, and then telling your story to leave as a legacy for those that come after you.



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