About Ann...

A few years ago Ann wrote:

"I am still surprised that so many people are curious about my background, but here it is. You will see a family tendency to choose to live in areas away from the center of the church, and I have a lot to live up to. I come from a long line of pioneers.

My family comes primarily from the British isles, and the first ones went to America with the Mayflower. The first members to join the church were from Canada, during the Kirtland period. They went South to join the saints in Kirtland, but since most of the saints were leaving, they went to Missouri instead. After Missouri and Nauvoo they were on the way to SLC and joined the Mormon Battalion, eventually made it to SLC, then settled in the Mexican colonies, where my grandmother was born. The family had to leave Mexico twice during Pancho Villa's revolution. The second time they stayed in Arizona, where my father was born and grew up. I also have anscestors who were members of the United Brethern in England, and were baptised by Wilford Woodruff. The widowed mother and her children left England years later and were members of the Willie handcart company. She settled in Nephi, Utah, and her children ended up all over the Southwest US. Another branch are from Norway, and the first anscestor to join the church there was actually imprisoned for doing missionary work. I also have other anscestors who did extensive colonizing in the Southwest, and one (Jacob Hamblin) who spent most of his adult life working with the Indians of Utah, Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico. None of them actually seemed to spend much time in the same place. My great-grandmother's father spent decades as a missionary in New Zealand in the 19th century, and one of my dad's older brothers (Robert Miller) was one of the first missionaries to open the work in Costa Rica in 1946, and Guatemala in 1947. He had also served in the navy in the Pacific in WW II, at the same time as his brother Lloyd was a marine in the Pacific. At one point they were able to meet each other purely by "chance", which has become a favorite family story. It appears in the book "Saints at War", right after Neal Maxwell's story. My father enlisted when he turned 18 right after the end of the war, and served in the Army of Occupation in Japan. While there he developed the first (and only) cavity he ever had in his life. However, the base dentist was drunk more often than not, so he was advised to wait until he got back to the US and have it taken care of by an army dentist there before his discharge. He landed in Seattle, and went to church that weekend, where he met my aunt. He wasn't interested in her necessarily, but he was inerested in lunch, so he invited himself over, and met my mother. He returned to Arizona and began university, invited my mom down for Christmas, they got engaged, and he transferred up to the Univ. of Washington. Mom graduated in chemical engineering and worked for Boeing re-designing the B-52 bombers while Dad finished his PhD in soils chemistry. He accepted a position at USU in Logan, Utah, which is where my four siblings and I were born and raised. Mom quite work and became a full-time mother. Dad frequently had his graduate students over to our house, so I grew up meeting people from many cultures, countries, religions and languages. We spent a year in New Jersey while Dad was on sabbatical at Rutgers, and 4 months after we got back to Logan, we moved to Venezuela for a little over two years. I loved it -- tarantula colonies in the back yard, iguanas in the house and a huge mango tree full of lorikeet parrots. I also went to a Catholic girls' school taught by Sicilian nuns. It was very different than the Utah winter and culture I had left behind! The nearest church branch to us was a 5-hour drive up to the Andean foothills, so we didn't go often. I never dreamed I would be using the spanish I learned then 20 years later in my branch in Israel.

When I was about 5 there was an article in Life magazine (or was it Tine?) about Israelis living on the Egyptian border. At that time there were a lot of terrorist attacks over the border, so the Israelis spent a lot of time in their bomb shelters. There was a picture of a young mother holding her baby in the shelter, and her eyes pierced me. I can still see her expression 40 years later. That started my interest in Israel. In university I started looking for programs to Israel I could participate in, and ended up applying for a Zionist Youth Foundation program which combined 6 months on a kibbutz working and taking Hebrew classes. About a year before I had an institute teacher who had studied at Hebrew Univ. in Jerusalem for a semester, so I asked him if he knew any Israeli students I could write to. He gave me the address of Michael's younger brother, so we became penpals. During my six months on the kibbutz I was in the South, and M's family lived in the North. I was able to go visit them a couple of times, but never met Michael. He was always doing reserve duty. After I returned to the US, Michael went on a mission to the NYC mission (but never served in the city itself). I wrote him, and after he was released I came back to Israel to visit and we got engaged. I went back home the end of May, and on the 4th of June he was called up to fight in the war in Lebanon (1982). He was in the tank corp. It was a very long summer. We were married in the Logan temple in October and moved back to Israel immediately. All four of our children were born here, and all of us have dual Israeli - US citizenship. The children speak Hebrew to each other, and a mix of Hebrew and English to me. I teach English as a foreign language both in a jr/sr high school and at a college. Actually, the college was hit by a rocket which entered the building through my classroom and blew up in the basement library, so Fall semester may well be delayed.

Three of Michael's grandparents were Jewish, and came from eastern Europe: Chernowitz (once part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, now in the Ukraine) and Poland, mainly. The Hansen line came from Denmark and Holland and emigrated to Tennessee, Iowa and Wisconsin in the 19th century. M's Jewish grandfather left Chernowitz before WW I and ended up homesteading in Montana. He had been engaged, but needed to raise money to bring his fiancee over. By the time he had enough money, the war had started, and by the time he got back to Chernowitz his fiancee was married with children. He found another bride quickly and returned to Montana. Michael's mother met the missionaries and joined the church when she was 16. Later all of her sisters, her parents, and one brother joined as well. His father also met the missionaries as a teenager, but his mother wouldn't sign the permission for baptism, so he had to wait until he was 21. He was an aerospace engineer and worked all over the US, so the children were born in different places as well. Michael was born in California and he emigrated from North Carolina, and had lived in most of the states in between. His father had always wanted to move to Israel and had been active in Zionist groups in the US. He got a good job offer and moved with the family to Israel in the summer of 1973, just before the Yom Kippur war started. A year later he bought a small farm in the upper Galilee, where he lived until his return to the US six years ago.

Michael was drafted a year immigrating and went into the tank corp because that was where they were putting almost everyone. The tank corp had about 90% casualities in the Yom Kippur war. Michael served 2-1/2 years, then did reserve duty every year for 16 years after that. He loves the tanks! Military service is mandatory. The boys serve between 2-3 years (and more if it is a specialized job, like pilots, or computer work), and the girls serve 2. My oldest son served two years on a naval base and is now on a mission in the Rostov, Russia mission. My second son is serving 3 years in a paratroop unit and finishes in November. My daughter will go in next summer. Most of the boys also do at least a month's reserve duty every year until they are about 45 (they keep changing the age).

The church had missionaries in the Holy Land from the 1890's until the creation of Israel in 1948. After that there were handfulls of members here periodically -- students, kibbutz volunteers, medical professionals, etc. President Lee organized the first modern branch in Jerusalem in 1974 (or '73 -- I'm having what my mother calls a "senior moment"), and the Galilee branch was organized in 1976. We do not belong to any area, but report directly to the First Presidency. President Faust is in charge of us, and Elder Holland is his second-in-command. The Jerusalem branch has two groups -- one in Tel Aviv and one in Jerusalem. Their population varies greatly from month to month. They have a handful of Israeli members, the BYU people, some embassy personnel, international corporations workers (Intel, etc.), students and workers from 3rd-world countries who are here working as healthcare workers, construction workers, etc. The Galilee branch meets in Tiberius and has 60 members on paper; about half are active. We come from all over the world and most of us are Israeli citizens. When building the BYU Center 20 years ago, the Church signed an agreement with the Israeli government that we would not do missionary work here. It is not against any Israeli law, but the Church has asked us not to. They have also asked us to keep a low profile. That means we cannot talk to others about our beliefs, we cannot have nonmembers attend our meetings, and we cannot baptise anyone who is not a member of the immediate family of a member. We cannot order materials directly from the Distribution Center, and we do not appear in the official Church directory of units. We do not currently have permission to translate the LDS scriptures, so most of the children in the branch, whose mother tongue is Hebrew, cannot read for themselves the Book of Mormon, D&C or the Pearl of Great Price. We do, however, get to have more contact with the General Authorities than many members get, and of course, we get to walk in the footsteps of the Prophets, and of our Savior. By the way, our church meetings are held on Saturday.

I hope this answers your questions. I'm sorry it took so long to write, and that I wrote so much, but you did ask!

Again, thank you everyone for your prayers and your thoughtfulness. Happy Pioneer Day next week.

Ann"