We're "Grow"ing!

At the end of July we went to Temple Square for a family reunion.  It was a family reunion with over 2,500 cousins we have never met and we had a great time.  Shocking, I know.  It was all because of this man, Henry Grow Jr.

He was the man who designed and built the amazing roof on the Tabernacle in Salt Lake City. He also has a lot of other buildings to his credit like the Assembly Hall on Temple Square.  He had 4 wives and a total of 30 children and to date over 9,000 descendants have been identified which explains why 2,500 of them found themselves at Temple Square at the end of July.  If the Guinness Book of World Records had been contacted and had sent a representative to make an official count it would have been the largest family reunion on record.  I believe the reason so many family members turned out was because 2 of our cousins are General Authorities and hooked us up big time.  When you are (distantly) related to Elder C. Scott Grow, and Elder Marlin K. Jensen you get to have dinner in the lobby of the Conference Center. . .

. . .and you get to have family devotionals in the Tabernacle with the "Grow Tabernacle Choir". . .

. . .and you get to have special tours of the Tabernacle and see things that the public doesn't get to see.  I really enjoyed the 4 hours of presentations on the Grow family in Germany, Pennsylvania, and Utah and the building of the Tabernacle.  The kids enjoyed their time on Temple Square.

We all had name badges with a colored dot to show which wife we descended from. Our dots were red which meant we were from the first wife.  Not that it matters but I noticed that our General Authority cousins also had red dots. :-)   It is slightly ironic that our tie into this amazing pioneer family is from a G-Grandfather who had little to do with his own family after a bitter divorce. My grandmother was only 6 years old at the time and never really knew her father. She was not active in the church during her lifetime but amazingly her 2 children became active as children and have remained active their entire lives. It's kind of miracle when you think about it. So, we may have come through a "weak link" but our chain has gotten a lot stronger since then.