Where the Journey Began

First...it ought to be said that this trip to Nauvoo didn't begin when we went to the airport. It began when we started learning the stories of just a few of our ancestors.  Knowing about just a few was great, but we started to wish that we could know more about all of our ancestors who had been in Nauvoo in the 1830's and 1840's.  We didn't even know for sure how many were there, but we knew that being there would be more meaningful to us if we made the effort to learn a bit about them first.

Obviously taking lots of books/histories along with us was out of the question, and even the histories we had on disc or the ones we knew of that are on the Internet were not really a good option as they were.  We simply wouldn't have the time to sit and read histories about them once we got there.  We wanted to spend that time seeing and doing.

We decided we wanted "the cliff notes version" of their histories. Short profiles about their lives, with pictures if we could find them, organized in roughly the same outline for each so we could find the info we wanted at a glance. We began working on them a few months in advance, splitting them up between us, with some help from our parents, Megan, and Amber.  (Thank you so much!!!!)

We were amazed to find that between the Ison and Hansen sides of the family we have about 20 ancestors who were likely in Nauvoo during that period!  In the end we didn't have the time to write profiles about each of them, but we did finish 14.  We hope to be able to finish them all in the future.
The week before our trip, we each printed the finished profiles and put them in a 1" 3 ring binder to take along with us. 

You can take a look at my book here;

 

For me, beginning the journey here(learning their stories/making their profiles) made all the difference when we were actually there at Nauvoo.  Because I had begun to know these ancestors already, it was like I was taking them along with me.  It made them far more real to me than just names on a page.