 | Dear Gramps, I'm a member of the church and I have a question. My wife and I got in to a heated discussion about my wish to do genealogy and she says that I'm obsessing over it. The question is, what is crossing the line of obsession and hobby? I really don't know! My wife says I do genealogy once a week. And that is about right. Is that an obsession with genealogy? Jared H. Crow, rocketmail.com |
Dear Jared,
Perhaps your problem is not how much time you spend doing genealogy, but how much time you
spend doing things with your wife. I imagine her concern is not that you are doing
genealogy per se, but that you are not doing something else. What would she have you
do instead of going genealogy? If you could satisfy that need, it may be that there would
be no concern over how much time you spent doing other things.
The work we do in seeking after our ancestors is to provide for them the blessings of the
gospel that they cannot now provide for themselves. An appropriate place to start in genealogy is to provide for
the spiritual welfare of the
ancestors of our descendants--in other words, ourselves. If you could assure the happiness and welfare of your wife so that there would be no place in
your relationship for heated arguments, I would imagine that there would then be the time
and interest to do genealogy together.
Gramps