September 23-29 - Sunday to Saturday

Sunday September 23

We really enjoyed attending Music and the Spoken Word this morning. The spirit was strong. After the main concert the choir always sings “God Be With You Till We Meet Again” Acapella and it is really touching especially since that song has a soft spot for our family as parents and daughters sung that song together with Kim just before she passed away.

On the way to the tabernacle we talked to who we thought was a Mennonite family. They were from Indiana. They walked with us and we explained what was happening with how the choir broadcast works. They were really excited to attend. After the concert Sister Tolman noticed two or three families that were taking pictures on Temple Square so she volunteered to take a picture with the whole family. She is always looking for chances to help others.

The Tabernacle (Fare Menemene in Tahitian)

Family that Sister Tolman helped

We enjoyed church. Both Sacrament meeting and Sunday School themes were on the Book of Mormon. I do love the Book of Mormon and enjoy reading and studying each day. I taught the lesson for Priesthood Meeting. The subject was President Nelson’s talk from April 2015 General Conference titled “The Sabbath Is a Delight”.

I really like one quote from the talk that follows.

“How do we hallow the Sabbath day? In my much younger years, I studied the work of others who had compiled lists of things to do and things not to do on the Sabbath. It wasn’t until later that I learned from the scriptures that my conduct and my attitude on the Sabbath constituted a sign between me and my Heavenly Father. With that understanding, I no longer needed lists of dos and don’ts. When I had to make a decision whether or not an activity was appropriate for the Sabbath, I simply asked myself, “What sign do I want to give to God?” That question made my choices about the Sabbath day crystal clear.”

We enjoyed a pot luck dinner with the missionaries on our floor (fifth floor) in the West Temple Apartments. We enjoyed a meal of Hawaiian haystacks. We shared a little about ourselves. We will have get together every fourth Sunday after church. We enjoy becoming friends with these missionaries.

Monday September 24

Our morning started with the regular Mission devotional. We enjoyed hearing from seven missionaries. We also said goodbye to many missionaries who are leaving this week. We have become friends with several of them and will miss them but that is what happens as missionaries come and go every month. Missionaries leave near the end of each month and new ones start near the beginning of each month.

Today we managed to get our Primary Care Physician set up with our Medicare Advantage Plan that we have with AARP / United Health Care. We have our annual appointments set for this coming February. We also went shopping at Costco.

In the evening we had a dinner for the whole mission plus a mission conference. The dinner was held on the first floor of the Conference Center. We had fajitas for the main course and pie or cake for dessert (I had my favorite – Carrot Cake). The food was good. We sat by our friends the Elder Rick and Sister Danette Turner who were with us at the MTC.

The mission conference was really excellent with the subject being the Doctrine of the Restoration. President Fenn is such a good teacher. No one there can doubt his witness of the truthfulness of the restoration of the gospel through the prophet Joseph Smith and of the Book of Mormon. He ended with my favorite scripture in 2 Nephi 31: 20: “Wherefore ye must press forward with a steadfastness in Christ and a love of God and of all men. Wherefore if ye press forward, feasting upon the word of Christ and endure to the end, behold thus saith the Father, ye shall have eternal life.” We need to maintain our testimony of the Prophet Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon and follow the guidance of the living prophet. I look forward to reviewing his presentation again as it will be posted on the internal mission website.

Tuesday September 25

Sister Tolman only worked a half day at the COB today so she helped at the Family History LIbrary in the morning. I worked on my Research training document for most of the morning with a break working as Assistant Floor Supervisor for an hour.

I helped a member sister who is the first person in her family who joined the church. I tried to help her find any church members in her tree. We weren’t able to find someone but I managed to help her with a few other things.

I worked helping some of the new missionary couples. I helped two people who visited the Family History Library to get accounts and connect to their families. One woman was from Park City. She knew a lot about her family so we were able to get her connected to some family already on the tree. Her family was from the Detroit area so she knew the city of Berkley where our family lived from 1973 to 1981. She was one of a group of four or five people. I was able to visit some with most of them and encouraged them to download the FamilyTree App. I helped a man about my age named Tom. He was from Texas. We were able to get his tree started and he was excited to see family members on three different census records, 1940, 1930 and 1920. We also found his sister’s birth record with his father’s signature. He will share that when he visits his sister.

I helped Sister Dixie Stratford who has been with us since the MTC. She works in the Discovery Zone on the first floor. She and Sister Tolman are really good friends. She has wanted us to help her. She is the main reason that I have been working on the Research training document. She has been reviewing the document as she has requested that we help her. We spent about 30 to 40 minutes going over the material and answering her questions. I showed her some about the last section that I plan to add and she liked that.

Wednesday September 26

Today is our day to attend the temple. When I was waiting for Sister Tolman, a temple worker asked if I was a General Authority, since I had a tag with Elder listed. I said no and that this is standard for full-time missionaries. After the session we visited with a Polynesian couple who have been married for less than a month. He was from Samoa and was wearing the traditional Samoan men’s skirt. She was from New Zealand.

Example of the Samoan men's skirt

On the way back to our apartment three high school age girls asked if they could take a picture of my tie and I said yes. I had just bought a new one yesterday at believe it or not Seagull Book store.

Over the past several days I have helped a member couple who have been visiting from Atlanta (Kathy and Dick). I have helped them with a lot of different things and today I showed them about finding help with the Family History Guide (thefhguide.com) and the Research Wiki. They met and were converted to the church 7 years ago. My first interaction with them was yesterday when Kathy wanted to find a relative who joined the church. This was a challenge since she was the first and only convert in her family. We looked in her tree but couldn’t find anything. Finally she went to the Discovery Floor and found some pioneer cousins (mission accomplished). It was enjoyable being able to get acquainted and helping them with the various questions that they have had from time to time.

I also helped a couple Dennis and Lynn from North Carolina. They had just finished with getting connected to FamilySearch and building their trees. I showed them what they could do with memories and they were excited to be able to take advantage of this feature.

The last person I helped was Deems Webster from Key West Florida. He was here with his girl friend Kathryn. They didn’t have much time so I tried to get his account set up quickly. It wasn’t working until we figured out that he was typing in his username incorrectly. Once we got him connected, we found his parents and other ancestors on the tree and found a lot of good historical records including seeing his parents on the 1940 census. We found out there is a Family History Center right near their home so they can get help when they get back to Key West. They had a really good experience and before they left I helped them find out how to get to the restaurant for dinner. We provide all kinds of help here at the Family History Library.

I helped woman with problem that she was having attaching a source. She had it connected to the wrong person. I helped her get it straightened out. Her husband was golfing at Mountain Dell golf course where Byron and I played a week ago. I was able to visit with them for a few minutes when he came to pick her up for dinner.

Thursday September 27

We have extra time on Thursdays before we go to work since we don’t start until 6pm. After a relaxing morning, we went to lunch at Chick-Fil-a in the Food Court at the City Creek Mall. We had chicken sandwich meals. After our lunch we went to the Church History Museum. We went through one exhibit on the first floor that covered Joseph Smith’s First Vision through the Nauvoo period. We saw a short video on the First Vision in a small theatre. The image surrounded three-fourths of the room and it was really inspiring. The material in this part of the museum is interactive with several kiosks that showed short vignettes that were very informative.

We visited with a sister who is a volunteer at the exhibit and we talked with her awhile. She has not been to Harmony or Kirtland so we shared our experience and also our recent experience in Nauvoo.

We ended up talking to an older couple while we were there and encouraged them to go to the Family History Library. When we arrived at the Family History Library for our shift at 6pm, there they were. We talked to them after and they had a really good experience finding their ancestors.

Today a birth certificate came that I had ordered for Joseph Falcus. I needed to confirm information about his parents. Joseph is connected indirectly to the Kerr family in northern England. What I found allowed me to connect him to his parents and siblings. When my great grandfather George Mercer Kerr’s sister Barbara died, her husband Thomas Angus married a widow whose first husband was Joseph Falcus.

I helped a man Walter Davis who is just older than I am by a few years. We needed to merge some records together to get his tree straightened out. After finishing that, we looked at this tree and noticed he had not added his mother’s information. We started and I noticed that his father married at the age of 51 and his mother was 20 years younger. I questioned that and he told me that is what happened. We tried to find information on his mother and then he indicated that her name might be different. She told Walter that she was an orphan. With the changed name, we found her family and verified that it was correct as it matched some information we found on Findagrave.com for his father. As we looked at this mother’s family a story started to unfold that might explain the situation. She was part of a large family living in a rural area. Maybe the parents couldn’t properly take care of all the children or there may be another explanation.

Friday September 28

Today was our apartment cleaning day. I swept and mopped the kitchen and vacuumed the carpets. Sister Tolman cleaned the bathrooms. Another division of duties is that Sister Tolman fixes lunch and dinner. We fix our own breakfasts most of the time. I do the dishes. We go food shopping together which has been an adjustment for Sister Tolman. I push the cart and cross the items off her shopping list. It is good walking exercise since we don’t know the stores as well as at home so we do even more walking than normal. The apartment has four small shopping carts that are kept outside that we use for transporting groceries to our 5th floor apartment if we have more that we both can carry in one trip.

In the morning before going to the library I worked on the training guide for Research and some time during the last several hours at the library and finally finished it. It is posted out on my family history blog. It is designed to help individuals with some background in Family History and Family Tree know where and how to get started with research to add people to their tree. Here is the blog link. gktfamilyhistorylessons.blogspot.com/

In the afternoon I helped a young man (probably in his late 20’s) get connected with his family. He name is Nicholas and he is from Spokane, Washington. We connected to his grandfather who was already on the tree. We found a marriage certificate for his grandparents on ancestry.com. I showed him how to upload the certificate to FamilyTree and add it as a document and also connect it as a source. We didn’t get much on his mother’s side and he will have to work on that at home as he has more information about her there. He was really surprised when we found so much about his family. At 2pm, I was assigned as floor supervisor so I let him know that if he needed help to raise his hand. He stayed for another couple of hours.

From 2pm to 4pm I was the floor supervisor. This assignment is normally for one hour but the person who was assigned for the second hour couldn’t be there. It was really busy from 2-3:30pm. Everyone was helping and people kept arriving on the floor. I managed to keep the balance between guests and missionaries but it was a real challenge. I was happy that we did not have to send any guests to another floor as our floor is best equipped to help first time visitors. We had 46 guests arrive during these two hours. The total for the day was 124 so about 1/3 of our total guests arrived between 2 and 4pm.

Dinner break from 5 to 6pm and then back to work until 9pm. I answered a few questions and help a young mother get her account straightened out so she could get her 10 year old son an account. We eventually called support because she could log on to her FamilySearch.org account and not her LDS.org account (both have the same username and password). Somehow she was locked out of her LDS.org account so the resource people reset her account and she was able to login. That was one I had not encountered before.

Saturday September 29

Ira Gentry came for a visit this morning. He arrived about 9:15am. He stayed for just over an hour. He now has a full weekend furlough so he is able to be at home from Friday night to Sunday night. We made a couple of corrections on his family tree for his grandparents on his mother’s side. We saw him last on September 1. With this new schedule, he will be able to visit at different times and may be able to visit on Friday nights.

Ira Genty with Elder Tolman in the Family History Library

It was a busy day again today. I was floor supervisor twice and kept busy matching missionaries with guests and being creative about how to handle all the incoming people. We had to assign more than one guest per missionary but it all worked out.

I had several interesting experiences today and I will share two of them. Paul did not know too much about family details. His family came from Louisiana and he is African American. He last name was Smith so I didn’t have much hope to be able help him. When I was checking on a computer next to him to try to find information he found a census record with showing a grandparent. He had remembered the name of an aunt who never married and had an unusual first name. We found her and the family on the 1940 census and were then able to find more about his family. I think that deceased aunt of his put that thought in his mind so he could find his family.

During the last hour an older couple Jim and Marilyn born in the 1930’s came to the library while I was floor supervisor. The wife was very worried about identity theft and was reluctant to get started. I assured her that what we did in the library would not cause her problems. I assigned her to a sister missionary to get started and 30 minutes later she hadn't yet got them signed up. The missionary needed to be switched as she had the floor supervisor assignment. I took over and managed to get them signed in within a few minutes. We didn’t have too much time left so we focused on one area of her family. We managed to find her parent’s marriage record which had her mother’s Polish maiden name which I printed out for them. We also found her with her parents on the 1940 US Census. We then found her father on the 1916 Canada census with his parents and siblings. She then learned her father’s first name before he changed it to one easier to pronounce. Before leaving we found a Family History Library near their home in San Clemente, California so they can get some help when they get home.

One of the missionaries gave us tickets for the Utah Symphony. The concert started at 5:30pm so we didn’t have time to go back to the apartment. We ate a quick snack and walked to the concert which was less than a five-minute walk. We enjoyed the first part of the concert the best. It was music from an American in Paris. The pianist in the second part of the concert was unbelieve. I have never seen anyone play the piano like he did.