Reviews?

I promised book reviews, get ready...

I was reminded of where I left off a couple of Sundays ago. The current sermon series is called "Kingdom of God: Grip It & Rip It" which is on the first chapters in Matthew. The first message was on the Genealogy of Christ, specifically how there are lots of people of ill repute but reformed characters in that lineage, specifically, Rahab, Ruth and Tamar. At one point in the sermon, it was mentioned that not to many people like genealogy. This brought back memories of the book I read when I quit giving reviews.

It is called "A Frederick Family Album: Memories, Pictures and Documents of an Iowa Farm Family" and was written and published by my aunt, Elizabeth VanderSchaaf.

This is not, by far, the first book she has written. In fact, she has more than 14 books behind her now, many of them dealing with my family history but all of them dealing with family history from my side of her family or her husband's side.

This was a fun book to read, especially when it started talking about those I was familiar with, my Grandmother (who died when I was 5) and my Grandfather, my great uncle Elmer, my Dad and Aunt. Of course, many of her memories were of my grandparents, my Father and herself.

There is quite a bit of historical information in there as well. For instance, I skipped over some of the legal documents that were included.

Now to tie things back to the sermon. One of the things that she always said was you tell family history, no matter how bad things looked. The point made by the pastor that Sunday was that you could tell that the lineage of Christ was real because it was not whitewashed but showed the good and the bad.