My angel grandmothers

Last winter, in spiritual and emotional preparation for giving birth to my third baby, I was reading The Gift of Giving Life. One of the chapters of that book highlights the significance of the generations of women you have descended from. Through reading that I began to feel such gratitude for my female ancestors and their lives, faith, and sacrifices through birth. They experienced the pains of labor and so I knew they could empathize as I experienced it again. I imagined them, essentially, as my doulas on the other side, surrounding me in love as I delivered my baby. In fact, my great-great grandmother on my mom's side, Sarah Elizabeth Carter, was trained in obstetric nursing under accomplished LDS female doctor Ellis R. Shipp. Sarah Elizabeth delivered hundreds of babies in southern Alberta, Canada, taking care of them and their mothers at her home which they coined "The Stork's Nest". She surely was equipped to empathize with a charitable love as I delivered my baby Evelyn.

After feeling that love for these grandmothers of mine, I decided I wanted to create something my daughters could look to to feel that closeness to these women. I believe these women still care about me and all their descendants with a mother's love. I also looked at it as I meditated and prayed for strength in preparation for labor and delivery. Evelyn's arrival was peaceful and joyful even amid the physical intensity of it all. I believe this was made possible through the peace of the Holy Ghost and enhanced by my strengthened testimony of my divine nature as a glorious woman of God. I also don't believe it unthinkable that one or more of these ancestors played a supportive role as Evelyn sacredly crossed the veil into this mortal life.

For my Raleigh relatives, here's a file you could modify for your own relatives. You can edit it within Google Slides or download/save/export as a PowerPoint File if you prefer editing it that way. I found almost all of my pictures through Familysearch.org.