Monday, February 18, 2013

We have the day off because of President's Day!  Because our zone supports a department without the Church Employment System (paid employees) and they have today off, we also get it off.  We've been in our zone for 2 weeks now.  (49 weeks to go but whose counting!!) Our zone's work is to support the Church department called Information Pipeline Organization.  Their responsibility is to take raw data - usually films with pages of information that have been taken from old records around the world - get it into a format that it can be sent out to the indexers.  Indexers look at each record and input any data that identifies people - names, dates, families, events, etc.  Once the information input into the system, then it all has to be checked for accuracy (data analysis), which is a several step process.  When it is through with the data analysis process, it is released to the public via Family Search or Family Tree.  It can be very boring to very interesting, depending on the records.  I can't say I love the work, but we are surrounded by interesting people who are wonderful to work with.  The sister who works on the other side of my cubicle is from North Carolina and has a beautiful southern accent.  I love listening to her speak.  I met a distant cousin who works in the zone and we were able to swap stories about our common ancestor.  So we are having lots of good experiences meeting new people.

For those of you who know me and what I think about what is happening in Idaho politics concerning education, you might be interested to know that the very first missionary I met our first day in the mission is a recently retired Idaho legislator who served on the House Education Committee!  I just about swallowed the cookie I was eating whole when he told me who he was!  The good thing is he is such a nice person and we've gotten to know him and his wife well, so I can't harbor any bad feelings toward him!  I'm taking a sabbatical from any politics this year!!

We are still loving living right downtown.  We spend alot of time walking.  I feel time we spend most of our time in tunnels, elevators, and on sidewalks.  But, we're getting to know where we can go to get what we need.  We'll go a whole week and not even go down to the parking garage. 

I've been trying to download some pictures but I can't seem to get it to work today!  Anyone know how to download a picture from a file?? I've tried the download button, copy and paste from the file, Nothing!  Boy, do I love computers!!!

I have to tell you about the strangest thing that happened last night!  Dale has an old book that tells about his great great uncle, Joseph Standing.  He was a missionary in the 1870's in Georgia and was killed by a mob because he was a Mormon.  There's a monument about his martyrdom in Georgia and in the Salt Lake Cemetery, the one I wrote about in a previous blog.  I was looking at the book last night and opened it up where there were 3 small old pieces of paper that look like clippings from newsletters.  As I looked at the first one, I noticed a item about an Elder C.W. Bodily performing baptisms.  This item's byline said Chicago.  I thought we had gotten the paper mixed up because  my grandfather, Christopher William Bodily, went on a mission back in the northern Midwest states.  I turned the paper over and there was an article about Joseph Standing's martydom years before. Dale's grandmother had clipped this article out of some newsletter because it was about her uncle and it just happens to have a item mentioning my grandfather on the other side!  This side of Dale's family lived in the Tremonton area in Utah which is in the Northern Utah.  My grandfather lived in Eastern Utah so there no way it was a community newsletter.  Can you believe that coincidence?  I'm still shaking my head wondering how that happened!  This family history stuff is really getting interesting!

We survived!  Our first week of our mission is completed!  We were trained on genealogy for 3 and 1/2 days, where one-on-one trainers tried their hardest to fill our brains with as much information as possible.  We came home every night exhausted.  But we were given our assignments on Friday.  We will be in the Historical Records Reconstitution and Data Analysis zone.  One of the biggest zones with the longest name of the 23 zones in the mission.  We start tomorrow.  Our work will have two parts.  One is taking oral histories and putting them in written form so they can be put on FamilyTree the new Family History program of the church.  Currently, they have people working records from alot of Polynesian countries and from Norway.  The other work of our zone is with indexing.  I know we do data analysis on the indexing material that comes in from all over and make sure it is done correctly, but I'm not too sure what that's all about! But I'm sure we'll know much more by the end of the month!

On Saturday, it was so beautiful outside that we decided to explore!  We walked on a park trail up through several neighborhoods and ended up here - -

We were amazed how clear the land is around Utah's Capitol, then we realized we are used to Idaho's Capitol Building which is right downtown surrounded by buildings!

In our wanderings we found this little park that is surrounded by apartment buildings.  This is what we found in the park -

I know you can't read the writing on this monument but it is Heber C. Kimball's grave.  It's just north of the Church History Library.  For those of you who don't know who he is, he was one of the original leaders of the Church just after it was formed in the mid-1800's.  He was an important figure in the organization of the Church and it's move out to Salt Lake.

During a stop at the Church History Library, we were told that there was a monument dedicated to Dale's great-great uncle in the Salt Lake City Cemetery so we went and got our car (too far to walk!).  We quickly found the monument.  This man's name was Joseph Standing and he was killed in 1879 when he was missionary in Georgia by a mob of 12 men.  The officials there indicted all twelve, tried two of the men, and they were acquitted.  One of the them is quoted as saying, "There's no law in Georgia for Mormons."  It was a very moving experience to see this monument as we have known the story for several years.

 

We decided to stay and look around as many of the Church leaders are buried in the cemetery.  There was a bit of a problem, though.  The snow was anywhere from 1 to 2 feet deep most places.  Dale only had his athletic shoes on (totally not prepared) whereas I had on boots.  So I got the job of searching out graves that we wanted to see that were not near the roads!!  The hard part was sometimes you would step and come down on the top of a gravestone and take another step and sink down another foot because there was no gravestone!  But I survived with no injury!

 

We were excited to find graves of many past leaders but the one we were most excited about was this one -

 

 

President Hinckley and his wife are buried here.  He was the past President of the Church and we all loved him.  It was nice to be able to find this monument and be able to pay our respects to him.

 

Is it strange to find so much joy out of discovering people's graves???  Hmmmm, I'll have to think about that!

 

Well, we start the "real" work tomorrow!  We've had just enough training on the genealogical research end of Family History to whet our appetites so we are going to try and continue on our own and see what we can find - after our work in our zone, however!!