November 10 - 16 - Sunday to Saturday

Sunday Nov 10

Today Music and the Spoken Word was the Veteran’s Day program.  It was excellent.  I talked to a women tourist from Ontario, Canada.  She was very impressed with the choir and with Utah and Salt Lake City.  This was her first time visiting and attending the broadcast.  Here is a picture that is a contrast from us sitting in this section last Monday night.  We sat in the balcony on the opposite side of the Tabernacle right in the middle so we had a excellent position to take pictures. 

Choir Program and text for the spoken word by Lloyd Newell

As we were coming into the JSMB for church, we met Sister Kate Lucas from the Grandview Ward who is in Salt Lake City for some training prior to going to New Zealand to serve a 23-month mission.  She was just finishing her first mission when we started in August 2018.  It was wonderful to see her again and get a chance to visit briefly.

I spent some time getting ready for Sacrament Meeting and preparing for Monday’s branch leadership meeting.  This is our last time taking the Sacrament bread as we have asked another couple to take care of this assignment for our branch.

We arrived about 12:35pm for our 1pm Sacrament meeting as I need to make sure that things are ready for the start of our meeting.  President McKnight was there early to help greet our arriving members.  I then noticed that I thought I saw Sister Kristin Oaks came in and sit down in the back of our chapel.  I asked one of our Young Elders if that was Sister Oaks and then he pointed up to the stand and there was President Dallin H Oaks talking to Elder Challis my first counselor.  I went up to the stand to greet President Oaks and shook his hand and welcomed him to our meeting.  I asked him if he would like to speak and he indicated that he would take about five minutes after our last speaker.  He then asked me where he should sit on the stand and I showed him where our presiding officer sits which is normally President Fenn or President McKnight and that is next to me on my left.  President Fenn talked to President Oaks and indicated that we would enjoy hearing more from him but he said that he likes to attend and just enjoy the meetings as they have been prepared.  I made sure everything was ready to start our meeting as we have been having trouble with the microphone at the Sacrament table.  See the note that I made on the Sunday program indicating the President Dallin H Oaks is presiding at the meeting. 

President and  Sister Oaks

We started the meeting and I announced that President Dallin H Oaks presides at the meeting. For our Sacrament we have a sister who needs gluten free bread so she provides a small plastic cup and one piece of gluten free bread that we have on the tray.  She always sits on the front row so that bread tray that is passed on the stand contains this plastic cup.  As the young Elder passing the Sacrament offered the tray to President Oaks, he took the bread from the gluten free cup.  It surprised me and I mentioned that this was gluten free and saved for a sister on the front row so he broke the bread in two and took one piece and put the other half back in the cup.  After that happened, I couldn’t believe that I had said that to President Oaks.  He was fine with what happened and he mentioned to me that he needs gluten free bread and rarely is able to take the Sacrament using gluten free bread and normally takes only a small piece of bread.  I was relieved after he spoke to me and felt alright about what I had done.  The Sacrament meeting went well with well-prepared talks and a beautiful special musical number. It was a privilege to be seated next to President for the meeting.  When the last scheduled speaker finished, President Oaks looked at me and I nodded that it was his turn to speak. He spoke then for just over five minutes. 

Here are a couple of thoughts that he shared.  He honored and thanked us for our service as missionaries.  We had a lot of choices but made the choice to serve as missionaries.  We are strengthened by our ancestors as we serve here.  For those missionaries serving who have lost spouses you are serving together on both sides of the veil.  The work is going forward on both sides of the veil but the ordinances work needs to be done here.  He bore his testimony.

President and Sister Oaks stayed for Priesthood and Relief Society.  I explained to him how our second hour was organized and he decided to divide his time with the Young Elders, Senior Elders, and then the Senior Sisters.  The subject for our Sunday lesson was President Nelson’s October conference talk at the Women’s session titled “Spiritual Treasures”.  One item that President Oaks mentioned during our lesson was that when talking about the women and men in the church we should say the Women and Priesthood Holders and not women and the Priesthood.  During the Relief Society lesson a missionary sister from Okinawa mentioned in her broken English how happy she was to have a temple planned for that island.  After the meeting Sister Oaks went up to her and spoke to her in Japanese.  Sister Oaks served a mission in Japan as a young sister missionary,.

After our meetings we stopped at the Family History Library to see the Olsen’s (my first counselor) and let them know what happened at Sacrament meeting.  Before I was able to talk to him, a couple raised their hands and needed help.  This couple was from the south and had ancestors in slavery.  I was able to find Census records back to 1880 and with that we figured out a best guess for birth information for these family members.  Hopefully with what we found they will be able to find them on the 1870 census which will get them back another generation.

We ate dinner at the Seniors.  We enjoyed Hamburger (Shepherd’s) Pie and Caesar Salad followed by cake and ice cream for dessert.

Monday Nov 11

Today is Veterans Day.  Sister Tolman sent out a letter first thing this morning talking about Veterans Day and also talking about our experience at church.

We did not have a mission devotional today so it was almost a real P-Day for us.  Sister Tolman fixed a tasty breakfast of eggs, hash brown, sausage and English muffins.  For juice we had mixed cranberry and orange juice (our favorite breakfast juice).  We had thought about going to Thanksgiving Point but decided to stay home and not go anywhere.  We started going through some of our papers and recycle what we don’t need.  Sister Tolman prepared a 30-day menu plan so we can use the food that we have in our apartment.

We talked to Becky as she called while in transit from her job site to her office.  We had a good visit with her and while talking to her, I noticed that it was Nov 11 at 11:11am and eight years ago exactly that our daughter Kim was married on this day and time.  We also talked to Angie and had a good phone visit with her. 

I attended the branch leadership meeting at 3pm.  We met for about an hour and covered a lot of material. 

We attended the Book of Mormon class led by President Fenn.  It was good to be able to hear from him as he has not been feeling well recently. We only have two more Book of Mormon classes (December and January).  President Fenn covered 3 Nephi 28 – 30 and 4th Nephi.  3 Nephi 28 talks about the change needed to the Three Nephites so that they could remain on the earth until the Savior’s Second Coming.  President Fenn talked about that in his opinion translated beings are not bound by the time and space continuum.   See 3 Nephi 28:39.

From Fourth Nephi he talked about how to create a Zion Society which is what existed for 200 years following the Savior’s visit to the Americas.  One very important part of this type of society is to eliminate contention and that this is something we can do in our mission.  Here are the things the people did to create the Zion Society

1- No Contention because of the love of God in their hearts

2- No class stratification

3- All converted and keeping covenants

4- Kept the Sabbath Day

5- All things in common (Law of Consecration)

6- Never a happier people

How to destroy a Zion Society which is what happened after two generations passed away beginning about 200 AD.

1- Pride and contentions

2- Set hearts on riches

3- Class distinctions

4- Willfully rebelled

5- Secret combinations and false prophets

6- Denied the truth – apostasy

7- Unrighteous allowed to participate in the ordinances

Tuesday Nov 12

We only had a half day at the library as we had the start of our Capstone 1 class from 12:30pm to 4pm.

Sister Amos from the 2nd floor needed help learning to use the photo scanner so helped her.  I went down to the British Floor (B2) to help the Zone Leader, Elder Watson, update the shared spreadsheet with the information for Sacrament meeting speakers and prayers for December.  Once I showed him, he said that this is easy and he will be able to take care of adding the information.

I visited with David Kruger from Oklahoma.  He has visited the library several times and I have helped him before and we have become friends.  We talked for a while about a challenging situation that is going on with his daughter who is going through a difficult time following a divorce.

I was asked to help Stephanie from Texas who is here with her husband.  She wanted to get a FamilySearch account and be able to connect with her ancestors so she could get a fan chart printed.  Her husband has been working on FamilySearch for several years.  While she was getting her account set up, I found the ancestors on her mother’s side and that side of her tree is fairly complete.  Once she set up her account, it was easy to connect to her mother and her mother’s family.  Our next step was to look at her father’s side of the family.  Her father’s name is Paul Fatula.  We looked at the sources attached to him and two wives had been connected.  We looked at census records and determined that there were two Paul Fatula’s born the same year and both in Pennsylvania.  Stephanie knew that her father had a sister Martha so we knew which Paul Fatula was her father.  Stephanie’s husband had not seen this problem when he added the information about Paul 4 years ago.  We got this straightened out and I have been working on adding some more information about him and his family.

We attended the Capstone 1 class.  Several from our floor and one from out MTC group are attending. 

We went out to dinner with the Turners at a nice Chinese Restaurant in Bountiful.  They had eaten there before.  It is the Mandarin Restaurant.  Here is the link.  We had the Char Shu Wonton Soup and an entrée Coconut Thai Curry Chicken Red Thai curry, coconut milk, green beans, onions, basil leaves, and chopped peanuts. **Comes HOT only.  The food was really good and we enjoyed visiting with them.

Wednesday Nov 13

Today is the 125th anniversary of the church’s formal effort with Genealogy and Family History.  The library celebrated this event today with displays and lunch.  

The various buildings housing the Genealogical Society of Utah and FamilySearch

We again only had a half day at the library as we had the second day of our Capstone 1 class from 12:30pm to 4pm. 

I talked to Sister Julianne Anderson from Library Services about teaching Sunday School and she was happy to do so.  She is from Logan, Utah and is good friends with Glenn and Martha Mortensen.  Glenn is my best friend from my growing up years and we visited them in October in Logan.  Sister Anderson will start teaching in January.

I helped a couple of people use the photo scanner to copy pictures and documents.  Later Sister Pouliot wanted me to help her scan some pictures but it was time to leave for so we would have time to get to the Church Office Building for our class.  

I helped Sister Hansen with next steps for her Tier 2 training.  I also helped Sister Felix figure out how to get started with the Tier 2 training for Family Search.  Just after helping her get started her husband came up from the International Floor as the Asian woman he was helping needed to recover her FamilySearch account.  We tried and then she finally remembered her password.

We joined in the celebration on the main floor and had lunch which consisted of cheese, meat (sliced beef and turkey), crackers, veggies and a brownie.  They had some leftovers so we took some home which we had for dinner.  A guest was looking for me as she had the last name Tolman.  She is Bee Tolman from Nelson, New Hampshire.  I believe that she is the first Tolman that I have met who did not descend from the three Tolman brothers who joined the church in 1845.  Bee indicated that she knew some family members had joined the church and moved West.  I needed to document this event so here we are.  

Elder Tolman and Bee Tolman (probably a sixth cousin)

We attended the second Capstone 1 class.  The presentation on Descendancy was good.  During the time they were reviewing how descendancy research works, I found some descendants from Isaac Rice who is my third great grandfather Ira Stearns Hatch’s grandfather who needed to be added to the tree.  I found two brothers to add to the tree.  I did some more checking and found that these two brothers were already on the tree but connected to their spouses and not to their parents so I made the connection and reserved the sealing to parents ordinances as the rest of their work was done.  These two brothers Leroy and Irving Vick are my sixth cousins (see them between the red brackets on the chart below).  Irving's wife Gladys is eligible for temple ordinances at the beginning of 2020.  As I was looking at this family on Thursday evening, I noticed another family member who needed temple work done.  See the couple Harry Edward Vick and Jessie Isabelle with the yellow temple icons. Read more about them on the Thursday and Saturday blog entries,

I finished research for Paul Fatula’s family.  I found he had a brother who died when only a year old.  I also found information about Paul’s mother and her parents based on a death certificate and some marriage certificates.  The mother died a tragic death.  I sent a FamilySearch message to Stephanie letting her know what I found.

Thursday Nov 14

We talked to Laura.  We were surprised to learn she no longer has chickens and ducks.  She is going to repurpose her chicken coop into a “she shed” (the man cave equivalent).

We attended the Salt Lake Temple.  We first completed two sealing sessions starting at 8am.  We were able to do seven couple sealings and three children to parent sealings.  After this Elder Tolman completed 10 Initiatory ordinances and Sister Tolman completed three Initiatory and eight baptisms.  We met back at the apartment to go to the Church Office Building for lunch and our last Capstone 1 class.  We enjoyed a lunch of prime rib, mashed potatoes and gravy, asparagus, and salad.

We completed the three day Capstone 1 class and learned some new things about using the Search records and the “Type” option which limits the search to categories for records such as birth, census, military, etc.

I found more information for Harry Edward Vick and Jessie Isabella.  I found the family on a census record which showed the birth date and place for Isabella.  This gave enough information to have ordinances completed for Jessie.  I later found Jessie's maiden name on a marriage record.  See the chart below showing the record hint.

During our evening shift from 6 to 9pm, I helped Sister Pennock understand some different ways of helping guests build their trees.  I also helped her with Memories and seeing which of her photos and documents need to be tagged (identifying who is in the document / photo).

Friday Nov 15

We did some of the weekly cleaning today and will finish tomorrow morning.

I noticed that Harry John Vick who is part of the family that I updated had his temple work reserved and shared with the temple.  The person who shared the ordinances was Sandra Hatch Wright who is my second cousin (our common ancestors are Orin Perry Hatch and Marinda Woodward).  I messaged her using the FamilySearch messaging feature.  She messaged me back and released the ordinances and I reserved them.  The collaboration feature on FamilySearch is really good as it is easy to send messages to others.  There is a new feature that enables us to see our relationship to others working on the tree,  To enable this feature,  go to “Settings, Contact”, and then select “Enable Relationship Viewing”. This then works the same way as the “Relatives Around Me” feature on the FamilyTree mobile app.

I led the 12:30pm prayer meeting.  On the way back to the office to return the prayer meeting materials, Sister Turley asked me for help.  I helped her understand what she needed to do to complete the pyramid training to get her purple pin.  She is a church service missionary and serves as a consultant in her ward.  I helped her add an audio recording to her page on FamilySearch.  I also showed her how to use the Memories mobile app to upload a picture of her deceased husband.  We added a better picture for him and updated his profile picture.

I spent some time visiting with David Kruger from Oklahoma.  I have probably helped him five times since I have been here.  He ended up going to the Salt Lake Temple two times since I saw him earlier this week and he is doing better.  Here is a picture.  

Elder Tolman and David Krueger

We went back to the apartment for lunch at 3pm.  I worked at the desk as the floor supervisor from 4pm to 6pm.

While we were walking to the library, we noticed a possible problem in the construction going on around West Temple and North Temple and it was a water main break.  At just before 6pm, David Young came up to the third floor and told us they were closing the library as the water was going to be shut off.   I announced that we needed to leave and about 15 minutes later we found out we didn’t need to leave.  Most of the people who didn’t want to leave were able to come back or had not left yet.

Here is a picture of Sister Tolman and Elder Spears.  These two have passed the requirements and received their blue pins and their US/Canada pins and are the only ones on the third floor who have done so.  Congratulations.  Sister Tolman is also close to passing off her British pin as well.

Sister Tolman and Elder Spears

I helped Elizabeth from Kansas City, Missouri.  She had a lot of questions about FamilySearch and I helped her make some corrections on her tree.   I showed her how the fan chart can help her identify areas where not as many sources are added, areas where problems need to be corrected, and missing birth country identification.  I helped her attach sources and learn more about Memories.  I also showed her FamilySearch Indexing and she got excited about sharing and helping by indexing records.

Sister Seve who is in our MTC group came to the library to get help and Sister Tolman helped her for several hours. She has a pretty filled in tree so we talked about ways to find people and information. She was grateful for the help.

Saturday Nov 16 
We finished the weekly cleaning and went food shopping at Smith’s and Lucky’s.  We talked to Julianna and had a good phone visit with her.  Sister Tolman fixed a lunch for us as we stay at the library on Saturdays for our meals since we have fewer missionaries and don’t always have an hour available for lunch or dinner.

I worked some more on the Vick family and completed more research for Henry and Isabella Vick. I found their son and his wife and added them to the tree.  See their information below.  You also see the other family members added earlier in the week.

We started at the library at 1pm as this is our later start for Saturday.  I helped Janice Pouliot with some family history questions and some help she needed printing photos.  I convinced her that she didn’t want to print out color photos on the printers in the library and the better option is to send photos to a place like Walgreen’s and have them print the photos.  It is not only better but cheaper than using the color print option in the library.  She wanted to see if we are related but doesn’t have the FamilySearch mobile app.  I figured out a way.  I had her enable “Relationship Viewing” as I described on the Friday entry.  Then I had her give me the FamilyTree ID for a person she had updated.  I then went to that person, looked at the change log, and then clicked on her name.  We are thirteenth cousins.  Janice did not want to leave the relationship viewing option turned on, so I had her make the change.

After our dinner, Elder Peterson and Elder Benton were talking to a member guest at the desk who indicated that he could not sign into his Member Tools app on his phone. He had tried uninstalling and then installing the app.  I said that I would try to help him.  We went to a computer and I had him login to his ChurchofJesusChrist.org account which he was able to do,.  I looked at his username and then he showed me his password.  I carefully signed into his MemberTools app with his username and password and like magic it worked.  I figured that he had not been typing in his password correctly even though he thought that he had.  This was an easy solution to a nagging problem for him.  We never know what kind of problems we are asked to solve.

I received a message on FamilySearch from Stephanie whom I helped on Tuesday.  Here is what I sent to her and her response.

November 13 message

“Stephanie,
I found more information about your Father's family. I found that he had a brother who died as an infant based on a death certificate. I found your grandmother Julia's death certificate. These death certificates are attached as sources and listed in their memories. I found names for Julia's parents based on several sources which are attached to them. Hope all is well with you and your family.

Elder Tolman”

November 16 response

“Thank you so much for all your wonderful help”