December 30 - January 5 - Sunday to Saturday

Here is a picture of the mountains east of the Salt Lake Valley as seen from in front of the Jordan River Temple.

Sunday Dec 30

We attended Music and the Spoken Word in the Conference Center.  Next week it will be held in the Tabernacle meaning we will have to walk a little farther in the cold.  This picture was taken while the choir was singing "When You Wish Upon a Star"

We both spoke in Sacrament Meeting today.  It was a little intimidating speaking in front of so many senior missionaries.  From a historical perspective we were the last to speak in the regular 70 minute Sacrament Meeting as next Sunday begins the new schedule.  Our talks are posted on a separate blog entry titled “December 30 – Sacrament Meeting Talks”

It started snowing when we were in church and we walked home at about 4pm with snowflakes instead of raindrops falling on our heads.  

Monday Dec 31

We attended the devotional and again were impressed on how blessed we are with our heritage and the blessings of having grown up in loving families. 

I helped a Sister Howell who has been assigned to produce a weekly newsletter for our zone.  She tried to attached links to messages from Gmail account.  I helped her set up folders on her google drive where she could put in the information that she wants to share about some missionaries each week.  I met with her before and after the Branch Leadership meeting that I attend each Monday at 3pm.  She finally caught on to what she needed to do and was able to send out the newsletter that the missionaries in our zone can now read.

A missionary couple, the Stotts, invited us for dinner and we enjoyed spending several hours with them.  They used to live in Mesa and Sister Stott served in the Mesa FamilySearch Library just before we did.  After dinner we played a game of Five Crowns which they brought with them but hadn’t played for a while.

The Stott’s are late night people so we returned to our apartment to await the New Year. We watched a movie from our laptop and then enjoyed watching fireworks out our window which faces west. There were at least five different areas where we saw fireworks.  They lasted for about 30 minutes after which we retired for the night.  HAPPY NEW YEAR!!

Tuesday Jan 1

Here we are in the new year having completed our first five months here in Salt Lake City.  I completed some finance work with wrapping up the end of year financial recording on Quicken and updating the 2018 tax estimates on an Excel spreadsheet.  After lunch we went to mom and dad Seniors and enjoyed watching some football games, playing a game and having dinner.  We returned to our apartment at about 6:30pm.

Wednesday Jan 2

I have been corresponding with a family history consultant, Rita Galloway, who lives in Florida.  She has been helping a cousin of mine Brother Harris who is a descendant of George Mercer Kerr and Jane Affleck through their son William who is my grandfather Walter A. Kerr’s brother.  She found some possible information about the Truick line.  John Truick is Jane Affleck’s grandfather and we don’t know about his parents.  Sister Galloway found a book written in 1990 that has information about the Truick family.   There are some possible ancestors in this book.

During the 12:30pm prayer meeting, I showed group how the search options on FamilySearch work a little differently when doing a search from the Person Page to FamilySearch or Ancestry and how Ancestry.com can help them with related searches.

I spent several hours working on figuring out some scheduling issues for January branch events.

Thursday Jan 3

We attended the temple this morning.  Since the Salt Lake Temple is closed for January, we went to the Jordan River Temple and attended the 9:20 Endowment session.  This temple now has sessions every 20 minutes during the day.  The Endowment content has some changes which has reduced the length of the session by about 20 minutes.  We very much enjoyed being at the temple. 

Jordan River Temple Celestial Room

We went shopping at all three grocery stores today, Rancho Market, Lucky’s and Smiths.  We had planned to go out to lunch at Kneaders but we found some two footlong subs for a total of $5 so we don’t have to walk to Kneaders today in the cold.

We started our work at 6pm as usual. I helped Dwight from Pennsylvania set up a FamilySearch account.  We were able to connect to his great-grandparents on this father’s side and this opened up a large section of ancestors.  He had limited time as he was going to the tabernacle choir practice with his family.

I also helped Sister Cheryl Adams.  I have helped her before.  I showed her some items including show to show windows side by side on the display.  I also helped her logon to her ancestry.com account.  She visits the library several times a week and lives just east of Temple Square.

Fri Jan 4

I straightened out some information on FamilyTree for Brother Harris and Sister Galloway.  They had attached a son William to our ancestor Anna Banks and her second husband Andrew Affleck.  Anna Banks was 53 at the time and could not have been William's mother.  The 1841 and 1851 census records also don’t show her with any children.  I was able to find where William belongs and it turns out that he is the grandson of Andrew Affleck by his first wife Margaret Barker.  William is now attached to the correct family.

I helped a church member learn about Ordinances Ready and showed her my blog to learn how to add people to her tree.  This started with her wanting to correct some information on an ancestor born in the 1500’s where there are no sources.

I was asked to help Leone who is a pilot with American Airlines and her husband is a pilot of Delta.  She receive her training as a pilot in the military.  I helped here get her family tree information from Ancestry.com to FamilySearch / FamilyTree.  Most of her ancestors were already on FamilyTree but there are a few additions and corrections that she can make later with the information she has researched.  I helped her learn to use the Research Wiki on FamilySearch and the Card Catalog and record collections on ancestry.com and familysearch.  It was very enjoyable to help her learn and be able to accomplish what she wanted to do during her one day layover in Salt Lake City.

I helped Daunn Smith and her daughter and son-in-law.  I  worked with Elder Stott and we compared their tree on ancestry.com with FamilyTree and found a mistake that needs to be resolved but were able to connect her family to individuals already the tree.working with ancestry.com and family tree.  Elder Stott thanked me for helping him and he said he learned a lot.  Just before they were ready to leave, the mother Daunn Smith asked if she could have a FamilySearch account also.  I told her certainly.  Within a few minutes we had her account established and connected what we had found on her daughters account.  She was so happy to have this available to her as well.  I also helped her add the mobile app to her phone.  Daunn thanked me again when she left the library.

Saturday Jan 5

We did our weekly cleaning today as we did not get this completed on Friday.  Elder Tolman does the sweeping and vacuuming and takes out the recycling and the garbage.  Sister Tolman does everything else which does not include dusting.  Today was the swap meet at 10:20am.  I gave away several items and Sister Tolman found a book, some CD’s and some clothes. 

Our branch president Elder Sherrill called and his son is being put in the  Bishopric in his ward in San Antonio on Sunday so he asked me if I would take over for him on Sunday the 6th.  Since his son will need to be ordained a High Priest, he wanted to be there to ordain him.

We started at the library at 1:00pm.  I spent the first 30 minutes or so updating some information about our branch meetings on the intranet and getting the program ready for next Sunday.

I helped a woman Tammy from Spokane, Washington.  Her husband is Native American.  Sister Disque was able to help him find information about his family.  I spent about two hours helping Tammy.  She had done some work on her family tree using Ancestry.com.  We set up an account for her on FamilySearch.org.  She brought up her tree on Ancestry.com on one computer and we set up her account on FamilySearch.org on another computer.  We found several of her ancestors on FamilyTree and connected her to them.  With a little work, we got her connected to a lot more of her ancestors on FamilyTree.  She was excited to see so much information about her family.

One thing that was a highlight was the we found her grandfather’s WWII draft registration card and it contained his mother’s full maiden name.  We made a copy of this card and added it as a source to him and his mother.   I helped her learn about many of the features available on FamilySearch and showed her the Family History Guide and the Research Wiki.  Here is what we found for her grandfather.

A young couple came up to the floor and started looking around and said they were just visiting.  Sister Tolman and I talked to them and she is a ward family history consultant so Sister Tolman suggested that I show her a couple of things. I showed her the Ordinances Read feature and my family history blog.  I also showed her The Family History Guide and the Research Wiki and helped the young man (her husband) learn a little about searching Mexican ancestors.  We packed a lot into a few minutes of training since they said they only had five minutes to spend.

Sister Tolman helped a young women Sydney who was visiting from Iowa.  She and a friend (a young man from Provo) went to Nepal for some sort of a service project.  Sister Tolman helped her build her tree and also helped her add a picture of her grandfather to the tree.  After she finds out more about her family when she returns home, she will be able to add even more to her tree.