Jeff Westover

Telling Your Own Story

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For the past several months I have watched my father go to work on his mother’s history. My Grandma, Maurine Westover, was a shining example of one devoted to the work of genealogical research, temple work and family history.

In the early 1980s while serving as a missionary with Grandpa at the Martin Harris Farm Grandma took to writing her own story — more than 12,000 words of text telling of her life from 1916 forward. It is wonderful.

A few short years later she was diagnosed with a terminal disease and my Dad, who had the means of broadcast-quality television recording equipment through his work, asked Grandma if she wouldn’t video tape her memories even though she had already made the effort to write them down.

Not only did she agree but she embraced the idea wholeheartedly. For several hours over a period of a couple of years she sat in a recliner and just talked — answering questions to individuals unseen on the screen.

Those recordings have for the most part remained under wraps. I believe my Dad had them digitally transferred and gave them as a whole as Christmas gifts a few years back to a few individuals. But until now there has not been a wholesale method to share them or to place them in context with her other records.

Now there is.

When Dad began the process of working on her history his first effort was to populate the history with images Grandma and Grandpa had taken and collected over the course of their lives. Most of these images were digitized at a family gathering at Keith’s house in Atlanta in 2009 — hundreds and hundreds of images we all worked to salvage.

As Dad dropped in the pictures he added a couple more elements — here and there his own comments have been added to Grandma’s manuscript. He also asked Aunt Evie to help him remember the layout of early homes and properties and together they added drawings to accompany the story Grandma was telling.

These efforts changed the record considerably. Grandma’s 12,000 words now spanned more than 150 pages in Microsoft Word and yielded files so massive they crashed the computer time and again.

Dad and I started to talk about the project and how to get it into the hands of the rest of the family — including the video. The only way that really works is by way of this website.

So slowly, page by page, we are editing and adding the video Grandma sat for nearly 30 years ago — and posting it all here. Over the course of the past several days we have extracted more than 40 video segments that go with Grandma’s manuscript.

As we look at it now it is a stunning record. And it is all her.

While the written manuscript tells her story the pictures and the video make it come alive. You can see her smile, laugh, and with great energy tell the story of her life and the people in it. It is like she is here again. You get a feel for her personality and for what was important to her.

These videos have the added gift of having Grandpa jump in here and there. He changes the tone by not only adding his perspective but by being himself — and the dynamics of their relationship emerges. Aunt Aldyth makes an appearance in a segment remembering Christmas as children. Frequent she and Dad are heard off screen making comments or asking questions. Because of this it gives the video in places the feel of a visit to my grandparents’ living room.

I can recall being present when some of these videos were recorded.

They were made at a time when I had regular contact and frequent visits with my grandparents. But it has been almost 30 years since I have heard their voices or felt their presence or heard them laugh. Seeing these videos brings them back.

Of course, instead of seeing them as a 20-something young man I’m now in my 50’s and have the life experience lens to seem them through now — and what a revelation it is!

Seeing Grandpa in his rumpled shirt — which may or may not be buttoned correctly — while at the same time seeing him in tears talk about giving a ring to Grandma during their courtship brings a delicate combination of emotions to me.

How simple it all is and yet how precious a record to have so that my wife and children can get to know these wonderful people who just happen to be my grandparents and theirs, too.

As of this writing I’ve only posted through their meeting and courtship – less than half of what Grandma originally wrote in her manuscript. But I feel a need to highlight it now. For as long as it is taking to edit the videos and put this all together it will take others out there a while to catch up to me.

But I want you to see it.

This is how telling your own story is done. In our modern age in technology there is no reason why each of us can’t leave behind a comprehensive record that uses text, images and videos in telling our story. Grandma here is showing us the way — as was her way with lots of things.

To see this you’ll need to log-in and go to her profile page. The links to her record are beneath the pictures.

Jeff Westover

Profound Lessons from Cleaning Out the Garage

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It has been a source of some bitterness to me that on top of all we have been through this year we had to make a move we didn’t anticipate and didn’t want. We literally left our home of the past several years kicking and screaming in protest. And it was a pretty ugly experience – it was done in haste, things were scattered and we have had to adjust to everything new on the fly. Here is it months later and we are still trying to find a home for everything.

So when my Dad needed to move in recent weeks I knew it would not be something I would embrace with enthusiasm.

As is common, I think, for a widower, Dad is saddled with 50+ years of accumulation – stuff that he and Mom worked hard for and that reflect a life together of constantly changing circumstances of both need and want.

They have a lot of stuff.

I have not been the only one who has been involved with helping Dad move. On one glorious Saturday a few weeks ago my sisters, my kids and several of my nieces and other available folks came together for just one big part of the overall project of getting stuff moved. It was actually a fun day, despite the work.

Dad rented a large – and I mean HUGE – storage unit closer to his new home and we have been slowly filling it, trying to organize it, while at the same time trying to thin it out. There have been many trips to the DI, some trips to the dump and plenty of spreading out of useful items to homes in the family. My son Enoch and his wife Angie are just getting started and their little apartment is filling up with some of the remnants of stuff left over from the times and seasons of my parents.

It would be easy, in my mind, to look at a storage unit some 100 feet deep and maybe 20 feet wide filled from back to front well over my head and think, “Wow, that’s a lot of crap.”

I’ll admit to thinking that some over the weeks we have been working on all this.

But as we have dug into the stuff I have come to some different conclusions.

Buried in all this stuff is the progression of individuals and of our family.

I spied some hand-made charts I recognized from family nights long ago. They were outlined by my Dad but they were the artistry of my Mom. “Remember those?” Dad asked me as I pulled one out. “Yes, I do. Very much so” I said, thinking of those lessons where Dad would have his scriptures open while using the charts. Mom said little during these lessons but she would be engaged nonetheless. My memory of those charts was shattered just a bit when Dad commented, “We made those to teach your mother the gospel.”

That’s a huge lesson: Dad and I were looking at the same thing but recalling our own perspectives of what they were. I always thought they were made for us kids to learn the gospel.

My mom was my Mom — I never considered when I was a kid learning from those charts that she learned from them too. And yet here was Dad telling me that he and Mom went to all that trouble to make those charts because he wanted to help Mom, a convert to the church and a recent one when those charts were made, to learn the gospel.

As we have worked side-by-side on stuff there are puddles of evidence from earlier lives of all of us – not just Mom and Dad.

Found were high school yearbooks, report cards, and various items of absolutely no value except in the memories they hold and the time of life they were to each of us.

Of course, having lost Mom, it has been hard not to see her fingerprints on everything.

Mother was a pack rat, you would think, and you’d be wasting your time and missing the point if that is all you see in that stuff.

Mother’s boxes and boxes of silk flowers, her handmade crocheted afghans, her prodigious supplies of scrapbooking stuff, and the crates and crates of Christmas decorations are so much more than the money spent on such stuff. They were the tools my mother used to create our home. My mother was a homemaker of the first order – always working to create a place of peace and warmth – for us.

As I’ve worked on this never ending project – and trust me, it’s going to take years – it has occurred to me that we’re not dismantling the life Mom and Dad put together.

We’re reassembling it and Mother is homemaking still as those items come to my home and my sibling’s homes and into the homes of her grandchildren.

There are teachable things in much of this stuff.

Over the course of the next several months I am going to call the family together again and again. I hope you will all come with your trucks and your minivans and your children, no matter how small, to help find the right homes for all these things that my Dad alone no longer needs.

Yes, some of it will be donated to charity and some will just be thrown out. But what can be used should be used by the family.

But as we gather from time to time to go through this stuff I hope you take the time to consider the story behind the stuff.

Weeks ago I found a couple of old reel-to-reel tapes that had recorded on them the audio of Christmas morning from 1967 that my Dad had made at the time. I was four. Can you imagine that morning of my parents with a 7 year old, a 5 year old, a 4 year old and a 2 year old?

Well today we stumbled upon the reel-to-reel recorder that made those recordings. Dad and I had already discussed it, hoping to find it eventually and he shared with me what that piece of equipment meant to him at the time. “It got me through college,” he told me. I understood what he was saying.

But when we found it today Enoch looked at it and not having anything to compare it to in his life experience had to ask, “What’s that?”

“That’s Granddad’s iPod,” I explained.

Enoch was there to do the heavy lifting and this thing is about the size of an ice chest and quite heavy. Enoch could only remark, “Well iPods were heavy back then!” as he hefted into the vehicle. In my mind, I’m thinking – “Wait until we get that thing going so he can hear when he old man was a four year old.”

Dad right now is very focused. He has been working on his mother’s history and I cannot wait to show you what has become of it. He is also working on my mother’s history, filling in gaps and providing a narrative that I think even my siblings will be surprised by.

As we have dug through the mountains of things the family history stuff has been set aside. There is SO MUCH to wade through, to organize, to scan and to, frankly, rescue.

For those of you who do not know, Dad has cancer. This was learned only about a month after Mom passed. It’s rare, it is treatable but he is in a stage of really not knowing how bad it is or how long he has. He’s hopeful, positive and looking forward.

Next month he will have a crucial exploratory surgery. We hope to know as a result of this procedure more about what he is exactly facing.

This is part of the reason why we are pushing so hard right now to get some order to all this “stuff”. Not only can Dad not physically handle this alone he will need help to organize and perhaps even delegate how our family history is managed going forward. He will need the time and attention of all his children and grandchildren who value their family history to step up and take a part in this.

Some have already begun. Matt, for example, has been scanning and organizing the letters from Grandpa Carl. That’s been a long-time project and he’s tackling it. It will give access to that material to all of us.

But there are other projects waiting to begin. And that is really what this is all about.

It isn’t a storage unit filled with stuff. It is part of all of us.

And guess what? I came home tonight and realized something: I’ve got a garage full of stuff too. It’s not as big and there is not as much.

But it is every bit as precious.

I’m betting you’ve got stuff too.

Jeff Westover

Attending Roots Tech 2016

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It has been announced that registration for Roots Tech 2016 opens in about a month, on September 15, 2015. Roots Tech will be held Wednesday, February 3rd through Saturday, February 6, 2016. We want to encourage as many family members as possible to register and attend as their resources and time allows.

Roots Tech is the world’s largest Family History conference. Every major vendor and resource in Genealogical and Family History research is represented at the conference and there are dozens of classes on all kinds of topics related to family history research.

If enough interest exists we would like to sponsor a family gathering in advance of Roots Tech to discuss family history opportunities and strategies for getting the most out of Roots Tech. We would propose a gathering either on the weekend before Roots Tech or on the evening of Wednesday, February 3rd, the first day of Roots Tech.

We would really like to encourage those with teenagers to especially prepare for Family Discovery Day at Roots Tech, which is a free all-day event on Saturday, February 6th. There are speakers from Church leadership, usually a youth challenge related to family history and temple work, and plenty of learning activities for getting our kids involved in Family History. We think it might be awesome as well just to get as many of our young cousins together as we can.

The world of Family History is changing fast. We understand how daunting it is to just even start. We are willing to help any interested family member learn enough before Roots Tech to make attending this event in Salt Lake City worth their time and energy. Please contact us if you would like help or more information. The more we add and involve other family members the more fun and productive this work is.

Jeff Westover

Our Connection to Pioneer Past

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It is Pioneer Day in Utah, an event marked much like the Fourth of July with parades, fireworks and picnics. To me it is a day I celebrate much differently now.

For several months I’ve been contemplating the patriarchal blessings of our pioneer ancestors, particularly those of Edwin Westover. He had three blessings in his lifetime.

Now that we know so much more about this first LDS patriarch of the Westover family it is more meaningful to me to celebrate Pioneer Day.

Edwin was not a perfect man. We tend to be guilty of what some call “ancestor worship”, especially within the Church as we picture them fighting the elements on the dusty trails of the west. I had read somewhere in the account of Grandma Sophie through the journals of Albert Smith that while the trek west as part of the Willie Handcart Company was indeed a trial it was merely a four month period in their lives. The greater trials, according to many of them, came not from the trek itself but the fight for survival afterwards.

I think that can definitely be said of Edwin. For Edwin, who had barely joined the Church and remarried before he started his trek west, the trial was indeed one of faith and enduring to the end. He was called upon to fulfill a life of toil — back breaking, even lonely work. Can you imagine how sparse it was to be in Southern Utah in the 1870s? Edwin was one of those of whom J. Golden Kimball said “paid a terrible price” for settling southern Utah.

What has stuck with me about Edwin was that he accepted those missions of the Church to Southern Utah under the same promise that led him on the trek in the first place. Remember that Edwin lost his father when he was ten, and his family was split up. He witnessed first hand the torment of his mother Electa, who for more than a decade afterwards searched for a way to bring her family back together.

When Edwin married and became a father it was to his mother he turned when he lost his first wife. If anyone understood, it was Electa. She taught him her newly acquired hope in Christ and quite nearly together they joined the church around the same time. And they never stopped chasing that promise of being with their loved ones forever — whether it was a spouse, a parent or a child.

Fast forward the clock more than 30 years — three full decades of hard pioneer living — and Edwin and Electa stood together inside the St. George temple to complete the temple work for their lost loved ones. Before going to the Temple Edwin sought out another patriarchal blessing. He had already had two.

But this third one was different. In it was a glorious promise so very tied to the temple, a promise central to the hope we all find in Christ. He was promised that one day after all of Israel had been gathered in he would feast with the Savior and the prophets and the apostles with all of his progenitors and posterity.

I weep when I consider that promise. That promise is addressed to each of us and I thrill at the idea that I might one day be able to sit with this beloved grandfather and celebrate the glad tidings of salvation. He believed in those things and so do I.

It makes Pioneer Day worthy of celebration because it connects us to him in ways even pictures and stories cannot. We are the vision that not only the prophets saw but also that our pioneer ancestors clung to.

Not long after his temple experience in St. George Edwin died and was released from his many earthly missions he was serving in Southern Utah. I have to wonder who was there on the other side to greet him.

What would he have said to his father, Alexander? What could he have testified to those generations before him who did not have the gospel of Jesus Christ? — to Amos, to John and to Jonas and Jonas, Jr?

I think he would have said the same things he would say to us today: “I will see you there, in that millennial day.”

Jay Westover

Mom

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It is difficult to put pen to paper and begin to adequately convey the impact of my Mother and her teachings on my life.

The bond between a Mother and son is unique, special and, in my case, sacred and tender. I have always been a “momma’s boy” but not in the sense that most in the world view that term.

Being her first born and as she mentioned to me many many times growing up, I did not come with an instruction manual. Mom became a Mother at the tender age of 17. How young that was. Yet, how wise was her counsel and how effective her parenting skills. My siblings will look back fondly at the many creative discipline techniques my Mother deployed and, yes, the vast majority of them were directed towards me. I deserved them. I was the instigator of many conflicts and disputes within the family in those early years.

Why? Upon reflection and now having raised a family of my own and watching my own children raise my grandchildren it appears every family has, to quote Reggie Jackson, ” a straw that stirs the drink”. There is no doubt that I tested my Mother’s patience and yes, I deserved every punishment ever delivered. However, I also know that Mom loved me and that I played a very special role in her life.

Quite simply, Mom and I grew up together. Weird as that may sound, it was very true. As I have grown older, I have thought many many times that the difference in age between myself and my youngest sister is 11 years and the age between Mom and I only 17. I was in my 50’s when Mom was in her 60’s. We not only grew up together, we grow old together as well. As such, Mom was not only my teacher, mentor and Mom, she was my friend and confidante as well.

The exploits and stories of my youth have been chronicled by my siblings in their writing and memories of Mom. But it is their recollections of times past. For me, my fondest and most sacred memories and experiences with and of Mom have occurred during the 35 years when I did not live with Mom and Dad.

How grateful I was and am that my childhood was so fun and for the most part carefree. Mom and Dad worked very hard to make sure we had a wonderful childhood filled with wonderful memories, traditions, core values and teachable moments that would serve us well when we ventured out on our own and began to raise our own families. What a rare and special gift to know with certainty that my parents not only loved me, but would literally do anything for me, forgive every fault and make any sacrifice to insure their children had what was needed.

Mom as a mother provided me the example of what I wanted as qualities in the mother of my children. Loving, caring, willing to sacrifice and a strong love and faith in our Father in Heaven and the importance of family.

Mom as a wife provided me the example of how a marriage should be.. Love, laughter and kindness. Patience, a true helpmate, unconditional love and forgiveness. Family first. Selflessness not selfishness. The importance of marrying your best friend.

Mom as a Nana provided me the example of how a grandparent should be: fun, eccentric, reliable and loving. And most importantly an example and role model that provides your grandchildren a link to the past, someone to reach out to when times are tough in the present and finally someone who prepares them and instills within them the importance of an eternal family and a desire to live large, dream big and go for it.

Mom, thank you. Thank you for your teaching, patience, laughter, love, discipline and faith. Thank you for your example, your long suffering and willingness to endure to the end so that your children and grandchildren could see that there is indeed a plan in place that allows us to be together as a family forever. Mom, I love you and look forward to seeing you again. Enjoy your next part of your journey. Heaven became a bit more lively with your arrival. Let the party begin!