January 27 - February 2 - Sunday to Saturday

Here is a picture of the beautiful scenery when the air is clear and we can see the mountains.  This is taken from the steps of the State Capital Building.

Sunday Jan 27                      

We attended Music and the Spoken Word in the morning and our City Creek Branch meetings from 1 to 3pm. 

One of my weekly assignments is to create the Sunday bulletin.  I normally finish it on Sunday and review it at our weekly branch leadership meeting on Monday afternoon and then make suggested updates and send it to our branch president to get it printed for the following Sunday.  I also make sure that assignments for Sacrament meeting talks and prayers and priesthood lessons are arranged for.

Since this is the fourth Sunday of the month, we participated in our fifth-floor dinner for all the residents on the fifth floor in the building. The main floor social room where we normally meet was occupied due to a scheduling conflict so we held the dinner in the hallway on the fifth floor. We moved tables and chairs from our rooms into the hallway (probably a fire code violation) and had a good dinner and visiting. Sister Tolman fixed lasagna.

Monday Jan 28

Seven years ago today our oldest daughter Kim passed away.  We all miss her and love her.  Here is a favorite picture taken of her when we lived in Michigan.

Kim at our home in 1979 - 1748 Beverly Blvd in Berkley, Michigan

Angie, Laura, Kim, Michelle, Janny and Becky in 1983 in Tempe, Arizona

Today is our P-Day as normal. We attended the mission devotional in the morning and then went to the library on the way back to our apartment as Elder Tolman had to get the information for Sunday’s Sacrament meeting (prayers and hymns).

We met for lunch with Elder Tolman’s family, Glenna, Gerri and Dave, and JoAnne and Craig.  We are planning to get together once a month while we are here.   We had a good visit before and after lunch at my sister Glenna’s house.  We enjoyed lunch at Famous Dave’s BBQ.  

We watched Mormon Yankees movie “The Spirit of the Game” with our MTC group.  We had watched this movie before we came on our mission.  The film tells the true story of the “Mormon Yankees” basketball team — a team comprised entirely of LDS missionaries serving in Melbourne, Australia, in 1956. The Mormon Yankees not only competed against the Australian Olympic team, but they also went on to play exhibition games against other Olympic teams, such as the French, Russian and Formosa China teams.  To learn more see this link  

Tuesday Jan 29

I visited with Elder Dahlin and he wants me to participate on a zone training committee of which he is the head.  I will most likely prepare some training material for our zone with the goal to help us improve the experience for our guests.  

I assigned Sister Tolman to help a woman about her age and I visited with her brother who got a master’s degree in Mathematics from Utah State about the same time that I got my degree from the University of Utah.  She helped the sister get her account and worked with her for close to an hour. 

I helped a new full-time missionary, Sister Montgomery who is from western Massachusetts.  She was trying to find sources for one of her ancestors and wasn’t having success. I looked at the person and noticed that the birth date and place were not completed and standardized.  The province in Canada was abbreviated.  Once we corrected that we were able to find the family on the 1911 Canada census and add this document as a source.  We added a child and also found a birth record for him.  This was a good learning experience and she was able to reserve temple ordinances.

We attended the zone leadership meeting from 2 to 3:15pm.  We were both able to contribute items in the meeting.

I visited with a guest who is visiting from the Buffalo, New York area.  She has been excited to work on her family history while here in the library.  Children from another family were somehow attached to her and yesterday the sister missionaries helped her get that straightened out.  We had a good visit.  She has a few questions about us serving as missionaries since the missionaries she was familiar with were our church’s proselyting missionaries.  I answered her questions and then she indicated that she was surprised about where our church started which was not too far from her home in New York.  We talked a little about the church organization and how it is different.  She has been traveling the country since November and will be returning home soon.

Wednesday Jan 30

It was wonderful to be able to attend an Endowment session at the Salt Lake Temple which is only a short walk from our apartment.  The temple has been closed for the first four weeks of January.  The length of time for the live session is now shorter by about 10 minutes.  We also became aware of a change that we had not noticed in the sessions at the Jordan River and Bountiful Temples.

I conducted the prayer meeting at 12:30pm prior the start of our 1 to 9pm assignment.  Sister Tolman gave a wonderful spiritual thought about a young 12 year-old boy in the Philippines and his experience in the temple completing the ordinance work for his deceased father.  I reviewed the “Research Assessment form” and how it can help us be more successful and focus as we help the guests. 

I had a meeting from 1:30 to 2:30pm to discuss training for our zone.  I now have the assignment to develop some training to be used in our prayer meetings.

I worked on some research for a tennis player Brian Ivan Cobham Norton (L11G-VCP) who is a distant cousin from South Africa.  He took second place at Wimbledon in 1921.  Here is the link to his wiki page and here is his picture.

I had previously arranged for Ira Gentry to visit today.  We visited for two hours between 5 and 7pm.  It was really good to get a chance to see him again since it has been more than a month since our last visit.  He plans to visit us more often as he now has clearance to visit the library.  He lives several blocks north of our apartment.

I helped Velma who is part of our Wednesday night group (a group of 4 to 6 church members who visit the library every Wednesday evening) get a family straightened out.  She noticed that an ancestor who lived in the 1800’s had an extra wife with four children.  We found both families on separate census records which proved that we had two separate families.   I helped her make the necessary changes.

I helped William Holder, a young man who is here mainly to go skiing.  He came into the library about one hour before closing so we didn’t have a lot of time.   He wanted to find out about his 2nd great-grandfather Frederick Holder from England.  I first tried to find him on FamilyTree but he had not been added.  We started with adding William and his parents and eventually found his ancestors back to Frederick.  We found him on the 1881 English census with his wife and children including William’s great grandfather.  We found the maiden name for this great grandmother and more information about his ancestors.  We found a possible marriage record for Fredrick and his wife Esther.  We added the record in his source box but did not add the information yet to the ancestors.  William was so excited to learn so much about his Holder side of the family.  He had done some research on his own and has an account on ancestry.com.  He couldn’t believe how much progress we made in an hour.  I sent him my training on English Research from the blog. 

Thursday Jan 31

I awoke early and could not get back to sleep.  I started thinking about how I could verify the marriage information for William Holder's ancestor and remembered how to do so. In looking at their son’s birth registration details on www.gro.gov.uk, I found that the last name of Clarke for Esther was the same as on the marriage record that we found.  I added this information to FamilySearch and sent an email to William with the details.

We went food shopping at Lucky and Smiths and ate lunch at Wendy’s for a change of pace.

Sister Tolman assigned me to help Todd and Nakesia who are co-workers from the Denver area.  I helped them build their trees on FamilySearch.  We were able to find ancestors back to Norway for Todd and found the christening record in Wisconsin for his grandfather.  He was excited and anxious to share what he had found with his parents.

Sister Tolman asked me to helped a member sister recover her ancestry account. I helped with that and she asked me how to find records in England in the 1600’s.  I showed her the ancestry.com Card Catalog and how to find specific record collections on Family Search.  As she was leaving she was so excited and shared with me that she had found some records about an ancestor from the 1600’s.

Friday Feb 1

Today is our day for cleaning the apartment and it is also the first day of the month.  Two morning tasks were to sweep the kitchen and vacuum the floor.  I also took care of the monthly financial reconciliation on Quicken.

Sister Tolman had an interesting experience today.  One of the young Elders, Elder Bartholomew, was walking up South Temple earlier today and recognized Elder Gerrit Gong of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.  He hesitated and then decided to wave at Elder Gong and then Elder Gong waved back.  They talked briefly and Elder Bartholomew asked Elder Gong if he knew David Senior.  Of course he said yes and then asked now he knew David.  He said that he worked with David's sister on the third floor of the Family History Library.  Elder Gong asked Elder Bartholomew to say hello to Sister Tolman.  

Elder Alverson, Sister Tolman, Elder Bartholomew

I was busy for the three hours between 1 and 4pm.  I helped the new missionary Sister Montgomery.  She is familiar with ancestry.com and I showed her how to upload her tree from ancestry.com to myheritage.com.  I showed her how to sort and organize the sources for a person when there are a lot of sources attached.  She is familiar with searching records on ancestry.com and I showed her how to adjust the search criteria on familysearch when records can be found on ancestry.com and not on familysearch.

I helped one of our relatively new missionaries, Sister Peterson, merge some records for an ancestor.  She needed someone to double check what she was doing to avoid making a mistake.

Elder Anderson asked me to help him with a guest (Charles) who had a tree on ancestry.com and wanted to get the same information on FamilyTree.  I showed him how I handle this by checking FamilyTree to see which of his ancestors are already there.  Once they see that ancestors are there they are find with connecting to those ancestors rather that trying to input a data file (GEDCOM file) into FamilyTree.  Once we got him started, I asked his friend Martin if he would like some help.  He said yes and I worked with him using the same process.  The two of them share the same ancestry.com account and had done a lot of research.  Within less than an hour, I found some new information on FamilyTree that Martin did not have in ancestry.com.  We extended several of his lines and found an interesting fact about his great grandfather.  His first wife died about 9 months after their marriage (likely in childbirth) and several years later he married his first wife’s sister who is the great grandmother.

Saturday Feb 2

We picked up some appetizers at Smith’s for dinner tomorrow at Sister Tolman’s sister Marn’s house.  We will be taking the Seniors out there for dinner after church. One advantage of working the late shift on Saturday is that Sister Tolman can go to the swap meet where we can get free stuff that the other missionaries leave behind.  She found some clothes and a very unique cake pan and a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle.  So far we haven’t set aside time to work on the puzzles we bought for Christmas. 

I was asked to help Roberta Robinson, an older member sister, who needed help scanning about 15 documents- mostly death certificates but also included her birth certificate and a WWI service record for her father.  We uploaded the documents directly to her Gallery in FamilySearch and attached the documents to the correct ancestors.  I ended up doing most of the work but she was extremely grateful when we finished.  She told me the story of how she completed the temple work for her parents in 1988 in one day but somehow the records were lost so I helped her submit a case to the Temple Department to see if they can help.

Sister Tolman and I helped Brett and Ranenee Carlson, a young couple who live in the Salt Lake area in Holladay.  She helped him get connected to his family and was able to go back many generations.  I helped him scan some old documents and add them to FamilySearch.  While I helped him, Sister Tolman helped his wife Renenee get connected to her family.  They plan to visit the library again and scan some more documents.

I was able to help Valerie who is visiting from the Atlanta, Georgia area.  Several missionaries had tried to help without much success.  I was able to help her find some records that identified her grandmother’s maiden name.  We were then able to find the grandmother’s parents.  It is interesting that she had the clues in front of her all the time but didn’t recognize the information.  Her grandmother’s last name when she died was Slater and there were a lot of records hints on ancestry.com and FamilySearch about Lucille Stayton or Slayton.  I helped her find the birth record for her father which she knew was correct and it showed her grandmother’s maiden name as Stayton.  We then did some detective work and were able to find her on the 1930, 1920 and 1910 census and were then able to identify her great-grandparents. She was really happy as she had been trying for a long time to solve this problem and we got it solved in less than an hour.  As she was leaving she indicated that she had found some more information on another family line and was able to do so as a family member had an unusual first name.  It is always exciting to see our guests make some discoveries on their own after we have helped them.