Sharpening My Pencil

I am embarking on a new project.

Last night I got an e-mail from an old friend from back home with an interesting request.

Sue and I had reconnected recently on Facebook and spent some time together at the class reunion (her husband was in my class, although she's a couple of years older) and alumni banquet last month. Growing up together in the same village, we share a lot of memories of that little village (population about 350) and of all the people who lived there while we were children.

The local Baptist Church will be 200 years old next year (the other church, Presbyterian, burned down in the mid-nineties).

Sue was aware of my collection of old postcards of the village in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and read the account of the 3rd of July celebrations there that I posted on my blog earlier in the summer. She mentioned it at church, with the result that the anniversary committee requested that I write an illustrated village history as part of their commemoration!

It is an interesting request of someone who hasn't lived in the village since she went away to college 45 years ago.So, I've got nearly a year to do it (the celebration begins this October and ends with the anniversary itself next October). Time to dig out the diaries, regimental histories and family memoirs and get organized.

Here goes. Maybe now I can determine if the old story about the itinerant carpenter who supposedly worked on the steeple of that church is really true. His name was Brigham Young.