Family History meets Tudor England AMENDED

Lately I have been devouring historical novels about Tudor England. They are absolutely fascinating. (The Sixth Wife, The Lady Elizabeth, and Innocent Traitor: a novel of the Lady Jane Grey are the titles in case you are wondering.) As much as I love history and learning about people, I've never been one for retaining information, so although I've heard the names before, the stories are completely new to me. (That probably explains why I can read the same book 50 times and always be surprised by the ending.)

Anyway, as I've been reading I've been wondering where my family fit into this scene, since I know I am almost completely English as far back as you can go. So I decided to get on familysearch.org, which I have never done before, and look around through my family tree to see what I could find. After a few dead ends I was thrilled to come upon several lines going back to the 14th century, and found a line that goes back through Sir Thomas More (or Saint Thomas More, to the Catholic church). Amazing! I have read the name several times in connection with Queen Katherine Parr and Elizabeth 1st and I can't describe what an amazing feeling it was to come across this and discover where I fit into all this. That's who I was in Tudor England! Is that a weird way to say that? I'm not talking reincarnation or anything, but I can't think of how else to describe how I feel about my ancestors. I don't think that saying they are "where/who I come from" adequately describes it. I don't feel like they are just a part of me, but I am all of them put together. So, I discovered that I was Thomas More! and I'm him plus a whole lot of other people put together.

I remember at some point seeing William the Conqueror in my genealogy, but I have yet to rediscover where he is. Somewhere in there are also Captain Miles Standish, John Alden, and Priscilla Mullins of Mayflower fame. (***Mom, if you read this, all I want for Christmas is copies of whatever family trees you happen to have! And BTW I saw a cool book full of genealogy lines down in the storeroom when we were there at Christmas, I forgot to mention it, but it was old and really, really cool.)

Note to self or relatives: Ivie Romney, through her mother Annie Maria's Woodbury line to Mary Ward, then thru Mary's mother Sibbella Moore's line back through Thomas More, to help me find it again.

In addition to Thomas More, it was neat to see a couple of other knights, a Captain William Knowlton, and John de Burgh, Welsh Lord of Mawddwy, who from what I can gather, was the last in the royal line of William de la Pole (he was born in 1414).

As a coincidence, although I come from his son John, Thomas also had a daughter named Cecily, which name I just happen to love...kind of neat that it turns out to be sort of a family name, uncommon as it is. I guess good taste sometimes skips 40 generations (give or take a few). ;)

***So I'm looking around through the family trees more, and it appears that the line going back through Thomas More may be through adoption. Jacob Moore is listed as having two fathers, John Moore and Joseph Morse, and his mother is Elizabeth Whale. According to the dates, Elizabeth was married to Joseph Morse at the time of Jacob's birth (1645) -- the date of marriage to John Moore isn't until 1673. But because of the last name...I would assume that either the dates are mixed up or Jacob was adopted by his new father? Although it seems odd to be adopted at 28 years old, unless it was for inheritance purposes maybe. It's a mystery...

***On inbreeding: I accidentally figured out that Sibella Moore and her husband Isaac Ward are actually second cousins. Their grandparents were siblings (The above mentioned Jacob Moore being Sibella's grandfather, and his sister Mary Moore being Isaac's grandmother...interesting!) 

Our Money Makeover

Recently, Rebecca and I read The Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey and it made us take stock of our family's financial situation. I graduated from BYU about 4 1/2 years ago and have been employed ever since, but we felt that monetarily speaking, we had nothing to show for it.

Neither of us are big spenders and we don't have a lot of debt aside from student loans, but our savings is pretty dismal. We were meticulous budgeters when we got married (since we both had nothing when we started) and basically maintained our thorough budgeting habits up till now. However, even with our larger income, we felt like we could never get ahead. We had only 2 financial rules that we lived by: one, pay a full tithe and two, don't accrue consumer debt. Good rules, but we had no real goals beyond them. Ramsey's book outlines sound, basic money goals that helped us see what we could have and how we could live, if we were willing to work for it.

Here are the steps we are following:

1) Set up a $1,000 emergency fund

2) Pay off all debts from smallest to biggest

3) Add to the emergency fund until we have enough to cover 6 months worth of expenses

4) Put 15% of our gross income into retirement savings/investment

5) Build the children's college savings

6) Pay off our home mortgage early

7) Build wealth and give

We were able to finish step one quickly by pooling together money from various savings accounts. For step 2, we want to pay off all our debts within the next few months. To do this we've had to cut up our credit cards and cut out of our budget most of our entertainment money, vacation savings, art classes, swimming lessons, amusement parks, etc. We've explained to the kids that we're still going to have fun, but that we'll have to be creative about it. Also, we apologize now to extended family that we won't be able to do much traveling beyond the trips we have planned this year. (You're always welcome to visit us though!)

We expect to maintain this spartan regime until we've established our full emergency fund (step 3). Steps 4 and 5 will still probably squeeze our income a bit, but we should be able to bring back some of the "fun" stuff (paid in full with cash of course). As for step 6, we don't even own a house yet, so the mortgage isn't an issue for now. To be honest, we're not sure it's even worth it to buy a house in our area (based on rent vs. mortgage payment ratios). Step 7 assumes every need is met and we can focus on building wealth for pleasure and to give it away charitably (beyond tithes and offerings).

That's our plan in a nutshell. We're very optimistic about it because we both have agreed to it and we've already made a lot of progress toward our goals in this first month. I'll try to provide periodic updates of our progress as we go along and if any of you reading this have done the Total Money Makeover, please let us know how yours went (and please share any helpful hints).