Ratzlaff Family History

Lisa and I met while attending a dance class "lab" at Brigham Young University (BYU) early one Columbus Day morning. I remember walking into the class, seeing Lisa, then thinking, "Where have you been all my life?" then asked her if I could be her partner that morning. Since we were both reasonably good dancers, we hit it off pretty good. Our dancing led us to become closer, and we were soon engaged. Lisa and I were married on 09 Jul 1983 in the Jordan River temple.

Less than a year and a miscarriage later, our first child, Ricky, was born. After a couple of years of being temporarily out of school and working full-time and more miscarriages, Dani was born while we lived in the basement of Lisa's parents' house.

The first few years of marriage found us struggling through engineering school, debt, and trying to keep our little family alive. Lisa put me through school working at WordPerfect, a computer software company located in nearby Orem, Utah. Finally, I graduated from BYU with a Bachelor's degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering in Dec 1989. By Feb 1990 I was working at Novell, a computer networking company in Provo, Utah. AJ was born to us in the same month.

Now, we have a home of our own, and have been here for nearly twelve years. Lisa volunteered for lay-off at WordPerfect back in 1996 and is home to stay. With that, we now have our fourth child, Eric, who turned out wonderfully, in spite of arriving a full two months early. According to our doctor, our family has grown to its maximum, so we added two cats just to keep up with relatives.