This photo, from the 1880s or 1890s, shows the little church that my grandmother, a life-long Lutheran, attended until she left for America at eighteen (i.e., during this very time). The farm on which she was born and raised, Søgnesand, is at the very end of the Kjøsnesfjord, the area in the distance, enclosed by mountains, at the center of the photograph. They had to travel to the church by boat or, in the winter, sometimes by walking across the iced-over lake. I’ve visited this area several times, and love it deeply. The farm still belongs to relatives of mine. (Photo from Wikimedia Commons)
http://www.livescience.com/58456-1000-year-old-toy-viking-boat.html
I always find discoveries such as these — a little toy boat and a well-preserved shoe — very human, and somewhat touching. (It probably doesn’t hurt that one of my ancestral lines goes back to Norway; my grandmother immigrated to the United States when she was eighteen.)
They seem so real, and they make those to whom they belonged very real in my mind. Not mere abstractions, but people not altogether unlike me and my family and my children.
I’ve not been able to find his remarks online, but I seem to recall — and have long been impressed by — a comment made by Elder Boyd K. Packer at the World Conference on Records in 1980. Talking about the seeming impossibility of performing temple ordinances for all of those who have ever lived — because their names and identities and stories have been irretrievably lost from mortal records (if, indeed, they were ever recorded to begin with) — he answered his own question of what we can do now, pending further revelation and divine help: “We can love them,” he said, simply.
Curiously, contemplating a simple medieval shoe — or, perhaps even more, a little child’s toy boat from a millennium ago — helps me, at least, to do that.
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