Winchester Award

In an earlier post, I mentioned that I had another award coming soon. Last night it was announced. Unfortunately, I couldn’t be there. The Journey Takers received the Winchester Award from the Mormon History Association for the best thoroughly researched family or community history relating to the Mormon experience and published in 2010. The award was announced at their annual awards banquet held in conjunction with their conference, this year in St. George, UT.

You can see the Deseret News listing of the awards here. My award is listed on the second page. They gave out awards in several categories including some for graduate papers, thesis and dissertation awards, as well as a couple of other book awards.

I was very excited about the award – and sad I couldn’t attend the banquet. I actually considered going for a while – looking into plane ticket prices etc. I’ve never been to the Mormon History Association conference, but I’m sure I would love it. Maybe someday….

One of the reasons I couldn’t go was because my oldest (turning 11 on Monday) had her birthday party last night. It had a cat theme. Here are a couple of pictures.


Facepaint and headband ears turned all the kids into cats


My friend made this cute cat cake.



One of the funnest parts of the party was having the kids eat and drink like cats. They really got into it!

So, I could have been receiving this wonderful honor in St. George, but instead I was hot gluing fluffy pompoms to help the girls make their cat craft.

By the way, I plan to actually have a blog post with information for doing genealogy research soon! I have a post in mind about hints for finding your ancestors’ hometowns, so stay tuned…I’m feeling my burnout fading. I’m not sure if this is due to the award or the fact that we are taking a little trip to Cape Ann for Memorial Day. Can’t wait to sit on the sand (no way am I getting in that frigid water) on the beach – as long as it doesn’t rain!

BYU Magazine Review

Just wanted to share my excitement in a quick post here. The current BYU Magazine has a little blurb about my book. It says:

The Journey Takers is family history at its best. Leslie Albrecht Huber (BA ’98) transforms a buried past into a living present by following her journeying ancestors as they left their homes in Germany, Sweden, and England to travel to Zion in the American West. Huber’s exhaustive research takes her to her family’s homelands and enables her to reconstitute the communities, daily life, and eras in which her ancestors lived. Following them on their various journeys, she examines the historical impact of their decisions to emigrate.

I'll post more later: my attention is needed to help my ten-year-old daughter create an eighteenth-century courtesy book for her social studies project. Due tomorrow, of course. Then, my attention is requested to read another chapter of Ramona the Brave because it is due back to the library in two days.

Book Reviews, Plane Tickets, and Lectures

Whenever I hear a new review is out of my book, I get nervous (excited, but nervous too)! My heart always beats quickly as I scan the review the first time, trying to intake as quickly as possible what the reviewer’s general impression of the book was. I have experienced this twice in the past week as I have run across two new reviews of my book. First, (and this one isn’t all that new, I’m just a bit slow…) The Journey Takers was discussed on the Genealogy Guys Podcast at the end of November. You can access it here . They said The Journey Takers was a book that every genealogist should read!

Second, if you subscribe to the FORUM through FGS (Federation of Genealogical Societies), you will find a review in the current issue. You can also access it online (subscribers only) here. I was also pleased with this review. Here are the first two paragraphs:

“Have you ever looked beyond your ancestor’s names and thought about what they might have said, thought or felt as they traveled the road of life? Leslie Albrecht Huber intertwines her twentieth century life with that of her ancestors’ nineteenth century lives, in her quest to understand where her ancestors came from and how the generations came to her.

Huber travels to the places in Europe from which her families originated. She began in Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Germany where the Albrechts lived before sailing in 1880 from Hamburg bound for the United States. Huber tours the towns in which the Albrechts lived in an attempt to capture their emotions during the tides of historical changes. Huber explains how she comes to different realizations about her ancestors as she walks through her own life journey. She weaves a story of life, using historical context and what might have been into a story that is hard to put down.”

I have been enjoying the relative calm of January. (Don’t confuse this statement to mean I have been enjoying January, because this would not be true at all. It is currently about 5 degrees, we have approximately two feet of snow outside, and I just read that we should get 5-10 inches tomorrow, coated by another inch of ice on top of that. Delightful. But, I have digressed again….)

I only have one lecture this month, which I gave this past Saturday. It was “Beyond Names and Dates: Uncovering Your Ancestors’ Stories” which I gave to the Greater Lowell Genealogical Club.

The calm won’t last though, so I have been trying to get prepared for the whirlwind to come. (I love speaking and look forward to my lectures – it’s just the scheduling of these along with piano recitals, basketball games, etc. can make life a little hectic.) For one thing, I bought two sets of plane tickets last week. One was to Columbus to attend the Ohio Genealogical Society Conference at the end of March where I will be presenting a two-hour workshop entitled “Researching and Writing Your Ancestors’ Stories” as well as a one hour lecture on online immigration sources. I also bought my plane ticket to Utah. I am flying to Utah at the end of February for about a week and a half to do some lectures and book events. I will post my schedule soon in case anyone from Utah is interested.