history came up in conversation such as:
*When Mum and Dad were married in the church (as was the law of the
time before being sealed in the Aukland, New Zealand temple), Mum
walked down the aisle to the organ accompaniment of God of Our Fathers
Whose Almighty Hand. She chose this piece because she thought it
sounded good on a pipe organ on account of the fanfare.
*When she was seven years old and was living in Woolongong, New South
Wales. The boy she sat next to in school asked her which church she
belonged to; she said she didn't really belong to any but she knew her
mother was a Latter-day Saint and "I'd never heard of that" , but
"since my friend was Scottish and was a Presbyterian, then I presumed
that my dad must be that also since he was Scottish, so I started to
go to Presbyterian Sunday-school." which she did up until she joined
the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints when she was thirteen.
*Mum's mother, Edna Flick, was baptized when she was eight years old
by Marion G. Romney in Cockle Creek, Newcastle, Australia. It was a
time when the church was extremely small in Australia and her mother,
Clara Livinia Brown Flick, was a widow with five children to raise on
her own since her husband, Edward Albert Flick had died early of
pneumonia. Clara would walk with her children many miles to attend
church. The majority of the members had moved down to Sydney to be at
the center of the church, but Clara could not afford to move. As a
consequence, all of Clara's children married outside of the church. So
it wasn't until my mum, Julie was thirteen that her mother was
desiring to find the church again, and as it happened, the
missionaries knocked on the door. My mum, Julie, was not interested
initially, but was "taken in by the young missionaries" and began
listening to the discussions and learned that it was true. Mum was
baptized December 10, 1961. Her dad and brother never joined, but "Dad
was always supportive and took me to all of my church activities."
*When she was fifteen, Mum helped build the Wollongong, NSW chapel;
She would catch the bus after school and walk up the hill to the
chapel site where she did everything from stacking cement bricks,
mixing cement, creosoting floor joists, rubbing down walls, sticking
down roof shingles etc. She did over 1000 hours (perhaps more than any
of the youth).
