(Update 25 Feb 2011)

Because of severe weather conditions in and around Logan, we must unfortunately cancel the formal meeting which we had scheduled for 26 February at the Logan Temple. Family members are encouraged to visit their local temples as possible. Because of the delay in sending out this message, please forward this to others who might be planning on attending this event.

We would like to extend an invitation to all who are able to meet us in the Logan Temple February 26th for our annual Hale Family Temple Day.  Our schedule is as follows:

Gather in the temple cafeteria 11:00
Lunch/Family meeting 11:30
Dismiss to prepare for session 12:15
Session 1:00

This day commemorates the time Alma and Aroet Hale spent in the temple each year from January to February, performing ordinances for their ancestors.  Specifically, it celebrates the “Lighting of the Logan Temple,” a  phenomenon witnessed and documented at the culmination of their temple work in 1896.  A summary of this event is here.

It is an honor to meet together and carry on the tradition of our Hale ancestors.  If you cannot meet in the Logan temple, the HFO encourages you to participate in spirit through your own local temple.

The Hale family organization is nearing completion on a book of Aroet Lucius Little Hale (1828-1911), the oldest orphan of Jonathan Harriman Hale and Olive Boynton.  Aroet was a great man with an adventurous spirit.  His extensive journals tell tales of:

• traveling with Brigham Young on advance parties to prepare for the westward migration of early Latter-Day Saints;
• leading his orphaned brothers and sister across the plains;
• serving several early missions to settle areas in the southwestern United States for the church;
• negotiating with antagonistic Native Americans; and
• raising a large posterity.

The book committee has used Aroet’s journals to lead them through the compilation of this book, while researching extensively by visiting the areas Aroet lived in and settled, speaking with some of the relatives who actually remember him, and investigating other written sources to give us a better perspective of Aroet’s life and adventures.  Chapter biographies of each of his wives will be included, along with short excerpts on each of his children where information has been available.  Also included will be a CD paf file of Aroet’s genealogy.  Research for this book has been going on for over a decade.

The HFO would like to finish this project up and send the manuscript to be printed by the end of 2011 or spring 2012 at the latest.  If you are interested in participating in this project, please contact us!  There is plenty to do.

After our family website was hacked from a recently published security hole, I decided to wipe off the old site and start fresh, just in case there were lingering security problems from any of the other applications. I have installed the newest version of WordPress for the main portion of the site and PhpGedview for the genealogy portion. The newest version of PhpGedview doesn’t have the same security hole that existed just a month ago. It is great having people like John Finlay working to fix these issues as soon as they are discovered!

The biggest loss was that the hacker deleted our entire user database, but left our genealogy database intact. Any family member who used to have access, but no longer can login, will need to create a new user account using the same process as they did previously.