Dad’s brothers and sister decided to host a family reunion, the first in perhaps 20 years. I barely had energy to show up for the event.  But I love my Baker-Formisano aunts and uncles: Bill, Louise (deceased), Howard, and Helene.  I warmed to the occasion, happy to see my cousins and their families after so many years.  One cousin I once knew well approached me and hesitated, “Now…you’re….”  In fairness to him, I had a full head of hair the last time he saw me.  When it came Dad’s turn to speak to the assembled hundred family members, I winced at the incoherent story-ramble that might emerge.  Perhaps that was unfair of me, because he delivered a string of delightful stories about his direct ancestors, starting with Niels Bertelsen.  Niels was a Danish fisherman who converted to our Church in the 1850s, a scant two decades after its founding in Palmyra, New York.  The Bertelsens had no money to emigrate as a family, so Niels and ___ sent their children across the Atlantic Ocean, across the North American continent, one child at a time, without chaperone, as they could afford.  Nicolena, only 10 years old, crossed the ocean without family, and worked as a maid in New York City for two years, without a family, until she had enough money to join a company of Church members walking the thousand miles west to Utah Territory.  Needing to support herself in Richfield, a married Lena opened a store selling beautiful dresses she sewed.  Her son Nelson became the engineer and foreman of the Prince silver mine in Pioche, Nevada.  Nelson’s mining machinery manufactured steam, and he invented a clothes-washing system attached to the machinery, washing all the family’s laundry.  His wife Natalia Brighamina, from Sweden, baked bread weekly, and fried sugar doughnuts from the extra dough for the mining town’s children.  Natalia was Dad’s grandmother, and he knew her and loved her.  She played a pump organ and sang the old cowboy songs with the family.  Her doughnuts, her organ, and her lovingkindness made her popular and well-liked by the community.  As a small child, Dad whispered to her one day that he was hungry and would like a slice of bread with jam.  “Speak up, Sonny,” his father mocked, embarrassing the boy.  “We can’t hear you, and we all want know what you have to say.”  Natalia stood up her full 5-foot 2-inches and said sternly to her son, “I heard him perfectly well,” and led little Dad into the kitchen for his bread and jam.