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!!