My stake’s goal this year is to spend an hour a week on family history. I like this goal because it’s specific but not too specific. I can spend an hour a week typing up my mother-in-law’s journal, and that counts. Or I can look up my family’s stories on Family Search. If I’m lucky and choose the right line on descendency view(it’s like I’m blindfolded, stabbing with a push pin to get the right spot) I might find someone whose work needs to be done. It astonished me the first time I did this. I finished the last endowment yesterday. There are still sealings I need to get done.

Today I looked at pictures and read stories about Levi Thorpe. He’s my grandma’s grandfather. He was very poor as a child:

Levi Thorpe was born April 11, 1860 in Belper Derbyshire England of very poor parents. His childhood days were very unhappy as he seldom had sufficient food to satisfy his hunger. I have heard him tell of slipping over a fence and stealing a carrot or turnip and how he relished it. I also remember hearing him say he was sent to buy some molasses once, and was so hungry he kept sticking his finger in the bucket and licing his finger each time. When he arrived home his mother accused him of it, child like, he denied it, but he was punished severly for it. Another time he said he was so hungry after coming home from work, he took some flour his mother kept in a jar and stired it up with water to make a cake out of it, no shortening or baking powder. His brother George, older than he, came home before it was baked so father took it out of the oven and hid it until George was gone, then finished baking it. He said he broke it into pieces nd he went into he woods to eat it. When his mother came home and missed the flour, she accused his sister Hannah of taking it. Father said he felt so bad to have his sister blamed for what he himself had done, but was afraid to tell the truth. Father said when he was a small boy he would thread needles or run errands for a dear old lady named Mrs. Barns, and she would give him tread and treakle or syrup as we call it. When father was very young he worked in a spool factory and from there he went to work in the coal pit or mine. When he and his brother got home at night they would find their supper placed under a bowl.

He came to America, worked hard, bought land in Springville, raised 12 children (two died young), including my great-grandfather. I’ve know his name vaguely but never known his story.

I think that’s my favorite part of family history: discovering stories. I don’t remember them all clearly; I often forget them and then rediscover them later on. But I’m really glad when I find a story attached to a name in Family Search. Baking up a cake of flour and water and hiding it because you were so hungry. I’m glad he earned abundance later on in his life.