Family history and temple work offer us an opportunity to join in Jesus Christ’s work of salvation. The Lord has taught that though the worlds He has created for His children are “innumerable … unto man … all things are numbered unto me, for they are mine and I know them” ( Moses 1:35). That connection illuminates the reasons behind family history work specifically and temple worship more generally.Įngaging in family history research teaches us of the vastness and grand scope of God’s creation and underscores the individual and merciful reach of Christ’s Atonement. I was struck by the vast distances she had traveled and by the vast differences between her life and mine.ĭespite the span of time, space, and circumstance that separates us, however, I feel connected to my great-great-grandmother both through the sealing covenant and by knowing about her life.
My thoughts about her while I was in the temple were not about her need to have ordinances performed but about how those ordinances bound her and me together across time and space.Īs a child I lived in the same Utah town she had lived in, and eventually I visited Winter Quarters, Nauvoo, and the small English village where she was born. She was baptized in 1840 in England, was endowed in Nauvoo, Illinois, was sealed to her husband in Winter Quarters, Nebraska, and died in Utah.
Mariah (as she preferred to be called) is one of the reasons my family is even in the Church. For years, every time I attended the temple, I thought of my great-great-grandmother Hannah Mariah Eagles Harris (1817–88), but not because I needed to perform proxy temple work on her behalf.
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