September 15 - 21 - Sunday to Saturday

Pioneer Children's Memorial at This is the Place Heritage Park

Sunday September 15

Music and the Spoken Word was held in the Tabernacle and the building was full.  We arrived at about 8:35am and the main floor middle section was already full.  We sat in the balcony and had a good view.  The sounds are sharper in the Tabernacle due to the better acoustics and the smaller building compared to the conference center.

We had a very enjoyable Sacrament meeting.  I found out on Saturday that we were having a General Authority Seventy attend our meeting- J Devn Cornish.  He did not have a stake conference assignment this weekend but due to his own stake having stake conference, he was asked not to attend his stake.  When we arrived at about 12:45pm, President Fenn indicated that Elder Cornish might want to speak.  He did want to speak so we rearranged the speakers and asked one of them to not speak (he was happy to oblige).  Our topic for the meeting was patience.  Our two speakers finished and left Elder Cornish 15 minutes to speak to us. 

Elder Cornish shared a wonderful message.  He said that the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve have taught often about repentance and that we need to be on the right path heading in the right direction and continue to become better people.  We need to be clean and changed.  He quoted Doctrine and Covenants 6:9  ‘Say nothing but repentance unto this generation; keep my commandments, and assist to bring forth my work, according to my commandments and you shall be blessed.”  I made a note that we need to be converted and not just have a testimony. 

Our Sunday School lesson was excellent from Come Follow Me.  Sister Rains taught the lesson.  Following her lesson, I visited with her about a change in her teaching assignment as she will be going home in a few months.  She shared that she had been thinking that it was about time for her to be released from this assignment.  She will teach one more Sunday.

We had a nice dinner of potatoes, pork roast and squash at the Seniors.  Shelly Senior ended up eating with us and it was nice to have her there.  We brought some apple sauce.  After dinner and clean-up we played some games. We played four rounds of Seven Up.  Sister Tolman and I won one game and dad Senior won two.  We then played Five Crowns which took a long time.  Elder Tolman got the lowest score.

Monday September 16

Attended the mission devotional at 7:30am.  As we hear the stories of missionaries, we are so thankful for the kind and loving homes where we were raised and how blessed we are for our family heritage.

We decided not to go to Antelope Island due to how much time we had since it is an hour to get there and an hour back and a couple of hours to explore and we didn't have four hours.  Instead we enjoyed visiting This is the Place HeritagePark which is located around “This Is the Place Monument”.  We really enjoyed our visit there especially the Pioneer Children Memorial.  Here are some pictures of this memorial.

Ephraim Hanks and the Martin Handcart Rescue

Ephraim Hanks

The names of pioneer children who died - John Belnap is Gilbert Belnap's son
Gilbert is Elder Tolman's great-great grandfather

The rocks list all the 600+ names of the children who died crossing the plains on the way to Utah

We also stopped at a leather shop and the activity there was to pound some images into small leather squares. The man at the shop explained the difference between the different types of leather.  The best is full grain leather.  I showed him my brown leather belt which I have had for more than 10 years and he said that is was made of full grain leather.  I bought it in Old Town San Diego long ago and it is still good. 

We visited some other areas.  Here is Sister Tolman in front of a beautiful quilt in the Desert Hospital Building.

As we left the park we stopped at the Mormon Battalion Monument and took a few pictures.

Map of This Is the Place Heritage Park

We discussed preparations for our Hail and Farewell at the branch leadership meeting at 3pm.  I was worried about making sure we had a pianist to play the songs we sing to our incoming missionaries and outgoing missionaries as our regular pianist finished her mission.  I was assured that it was taken care of. I had the impression that Sister Abernathy, our neighbor in the West Temple Apartments would end up playing.  She hadn’t been asked but due to a misunderstanding with the person asked to play, Sister Abernathy stepped in and did an admirable job of playing the piano and Sister Tolman was the chorister for the two songs.  Elder Tolman was the Emcee.   One of my assignments as emcee is to determine who gets to go get dinner first.  After the incoming and outgoing missionaries and the mission presidency, the last three groups went by last names with those with last names starting with S to Z going first.

Missionaries who are leaving in September or October

We talked to Julianna in the evening after we returned home from the Hail and Farewell.

Input from Sister Tolman for the week

This has been an interesting week.  It is probably the busiest we have had all year.  It finally slowed down on Saturday night.  

I have had some weird requests but we do the best to help our guests.  Let me give you a couple of examples.

1. I would like to find a list of all the soldiers that were injured in the Battle of Brandywine during the Revolutionary War.  (Where do you even start?)

2. I am looking for an affidavit of a land record for an ancestor.  The land was given to him for his service in the Revolutionary War.  A research specialist who didn't know how to find this had a meeting and turned it over to me.  We tried hard and found him on a land record but only by name and amount of land he got.

3. I am looking for a record for a man my grandmother married.  I want a picture of him and to know more about him.  All I have is his name.  We seriously didn't find anything but the marriage and divorce records, but we did find those.  She was Jewish and her family came from Germany.

4. I want to extend my line but I only have the name of one person.  I don't know their parents or anything about them.  Can you help me?  This one happened several times this week.  I know we do a lot to help people but we are not magicians.   

I did have some great experiences this week and I will share one with you. Two women walked in and they said they had been to the British floor because that was where they were sent initially.  When they got there, they told them they couldn’t help them because they didn’t have enough information. So they came up to our floor to see if we could help them.  Elder Benton got Elder Buckley to help them.  They mostly wanted to search and see if they could find anything.  He spent a few minutes with them and found nothing.  Elder Benton sent me over to see if I could find anything.  I opened up Ancestry.com and started looking and the first record that we found was one of the people they had been looking for.  Then we found a naturalization record with a picture on it.  Then we switched people and found a high school yearbook picture for her mother.  She was so excited.  I asked them if they would be interested in opening an account and they readily agreed and so I turned them over to Elder Buckley.  After they had that up and going, I also showed them memories and the capabilities that it had.  They were so excited about everything they saw.  It was fun to help them and it was neat to see that Elder Buckley had watched us as we searched.  This will help him  to learn a new skill.

This week I have watched and talked to so many people that have truly felt the spirit of Elijah as they have worked.  It has been an amazing week.

Tuesday September 17

On Monday night Elder Don R Clark texted me and wanted to make sure that I would be able to help him for about 45 minutes starting around 8:45am.  I helped him with going over some temple work for a member of his ward who was going to be sealed to his deceased parents and then his parents to their parents.  Elder Clarke will perform the sealings for them Thursday of this week.  We also found some more ancestors of his that needed temple work completed.  We reviewed some information for a couple other members of his ward.  It was good to see Elder Clark again as he hasn’t been in the library since early June.

I helped at the front desk from 8:00am until 10:30am except for the 45 minutes I spent with Elder Clark.  I answered a lot of questions as we have a large genealogy group called “Ancestor Seekers” in the library this week.  Later in the afternoon Mark and Eileen Ethington (Sister Tolman’s uncle and Elder Tolman’s East High classmates) same to the library to get help with scanning photos and some documents.  We helped them for over an hour and ended up leaving about an hour late at about 5pm.

I had a lot of interesting and various opportunities to help.  Most of these were short questions taking only a few minutes to answer.  Some of these were helping a guest download an image to his flash drive, helping attach a source from her “Source Box” to an ancestor, connecting a laptop to the wireless network, taking over from two different missionaries when they needed to leave, and finding where some books were located.  I helped Tamara from Oregon get the information straightened out for her father who lived with his stepfather and not his biological father.  Once I understood what the situation was, I was able to help her get FamilyTree to reflect her family situation.

One woman needed to find some books about Mayflower descendants and was told to look for the silver books with Mayflower Five Generations.  We tried looking for “Silver Books” in the FamilySearch Catalog and found nothing.  The search for “Mayflower” resulted in hundreds of books.  She finally asked the person who told her about the books and she said the books are “silver” in color.  With that piece of information we found the books on the shelf and sure enough there were about 20 silver books containing information about Mayflower descendants.

We went to dinner at 5:30pm with David and Shelly and Mom and Dad Senior.  We went to Chubby’s for Mexican food.  This is mom and dad's favorite restaurant.  David calls it "Chumley's".  After dinner we watched the DVD of their 50th wedding anniversary celebration.  It was very enjoyable to see how everyone looked more than 20 years ago.

Wednesday September 18

I led the prayer meeting at 7:30am. I checked on the Sunday bulletin and Elder Olsen had sent it to me yesterday so I sent it on to the Young Elders at the JSMB to make copies for us.  I helped Sisters Godfrey and Chabries get started with the FHL Tier 2 training for Sections 1 & 2.  I also helped another missionary get access to this training. 

I helped Henry from Michigan.  His ancestors came from the Detroit area and he lives near Grand Rapids.  We did some searching and found a lot of historical records for his ancestors.  We tried to get his account for FamilySearch set up but couldn’t.  I found some of his family on FamilyTree using my FamilySearch account.  We ended up building his tree down to his parents who are deceased.  After about an hour, we needed to leave for lunch.  Elder Brown took over and was able to finally get his account setup and connected him to his parents.  Elder Brown also helped him understand where he could get help when he goes back home.

Sister Tolman asked me to explain to David Young (a library staff member) how to transfer family tree information from ancestry.com or other tree applications into FamilySearch. I explained what we do and he couldn’t believe that it was normally easy.  I will put together some training that can be used on how to do this.  I started working on this.

At 2pm we had a going away social honoring our missionaries who are leaving.  We will really miss Elder and Sister Dahlin who have been our Zone leaders and our good friends.  We have been a good team as we served as Assistant Zone leaders with them for about 10 months.

Sister Brown, Sister Sanders, Sister Dahlin and Elder Dahlin

My last helping assignment was to help a missionary from the second floor get some old documents scanned and uploaded for a guest she was working with. 

My smart phone is no longer smart and many of the apps have stopped working.  What is rather funny is that two things that still work is making and receiving phone calls and sending and received text messages.  What we used to need is to have a phone make a phone call.  Now we want so much more from our smart phones.   I went to the T-Mobile store in the City Creek Mall and bought a new phone.  The person who helped me was able to transfer all the apps and data from my old phone and now I have a new one.  It is the LG Stylo 4.  

Thursday September 19

We talked to our daughter Laura in the morning and then went to the 8am Endowment session in the Salt Lake Temple.   We didn’t have time to do a sealing session as we were both leaving around 11:30am to go to lunch. Elder Tolman went to lunch with his brother Byron and the Garden Park group and then played golf with Byron and one other at the Mountain Dell Lakes course.   Sister Tolman went to lunch with two friends at Zupas.  

Mountain Dell Lakes Course with Mountain Dell Reservoir in the background

For our evening meal we went for ice cream at Leatherby’s Family Creamery.  Sister Tolman had a sundae and Elder Tolman had a banana split.  These were delicious with plenty of ice cream and toppings.  Here is a picture of the banana split.  

Friday September 20

It rained most of the morning and we had  cooler temperatures.  We cleaned the house, had breakfast and then went food shopping.  Due to the colder temperatures, it snowed in the tops of the mountains.  We cleaned the house, had breakfast and then went food shopping before starting our shift at 12:30 pm. 

You can see the snow in the tops of the mountains east of the valley

We held our first combined prayer meeting today as our floor is now combined with the second floor and is titled the US and Canada Zone.  After the prayer meeting we received an assignment to speak in Sacrament meeting on October 20.  I gave the assignment to the Zone Leaders to arrange talks for Sacrament meeting and they gave us the assignment to speak. 

When I first got to the floor Don Attridge was waiting for me.  He wasn’t feeling well today but I helped him for about an hour.  I found an area to search for descendants of ancestors to find more family members.  This same area needed some cleanup work and I worked for several hours off and on to get the families straightened out.  The net result was three more people needing temple work.

I helped the Snyders from Northern California.  The wife had done quite a bit of work.  I showed her about the Research Wiki which she was totally excited about and also showed her the Family History Guide.  I helped her learn some more about the Memories function which she had already started. She downloaded the FamilySearch Memories app and I showed her how it works. 

A man and his wife were leaving the library after having a successful day.  I talked to the husband Paul Jones and asked him if he had installed the FamilySearch Tree app.  He had not so showed him how and once he installed the app, we tried the “Relatives Around Me”.  It turns out that we are eighth cousins.  His wife wanted a picture of us so here it is.  

Paul Jones and Elder Tolman - eighth cousins

Saturday September 21

Today is our daughter Angie’s birthday and her youngest daughter Sarah’s birthday as well.  We talked to Angie and Sarah during our dinner hour at the library.  Angie and Julianna and two of Julianna’s friends were a team that competed at the Temple Public Library in a puzzle contest.  Groups of up to four people complete to see who can put the puzzle together the fastest. All competitors work on the same puzzle.  They were more than 30 minutes ahead of the second-place team.   They are now two for two in puzzle contests.

I played golf with three other missionaries at the Old Mill Golf Course near Big Cottonwood Canyon.   The course has a beautiful setting.  Our foursome in addition to me was Elders Fell, Mumford and Richins.  I drove two others with me to the golf course (Elder Fell and Mumford).  Here are a few pictures. 

I was about 30 minutes late to the library and was assigned to help someone just after I got there.  I helped a woman, Marti, who is here visiting with others from her ward.  She was baptized earlier this year and this was the first time she has tried to find her family.  We were able to add a lot of family to her tree.  It was amazing as all she knew were her parents and a little about two grandparents.  With the information about the deaths of her grandparents, we were able to find historical records with them and their parents and then connected to ancestors already on the tree.   Marti was excited to find out so much about her family.  She didn’t know her church membership record number but when she returns home, I showed her how to add the information to her FamilySearch account. One church member who was here with Marti is a Ward Temple and Family History Consultant.  She learned a lot as I showed them the Research Wiki and how it can help with research.

I helped Chris who lives in Salt Lake City with his wife.  Their home is not too far from the library.  He had visited the library before but wasn’t able to get an account.  I verified that we could access his email account and then we were able to set up an account for him.  We found a lot of information on his family.  One goal was to find an ancestor who immigrated to the United States.  We finally found an ancestor born in England.  Most of this family have been in this country for many generations. He didn’t know much about his father but later while he was searching on his own, he found an obituary for his grandmother that included his father and other relatives including children and siblings.  This record will help him learn more about this side of the family.

We have had a busy week at the library with several groups visiting and we still have people stopping here during vacations.  This week was as busy as any week since the beginning of summer.  I did play golf twice this week which isn't normal.  I won't be able to play any more golf until later in October at the earliest.