Week Fifty-eight…Meetings, Meetings, Meetings, Early and Late.

We seemed to have a lot of meetings this week. I really don’t think they were more than usual, but it just seemed that way.

We got to the library a little late for our prayer meeting, but just in time to see the end of a video that Elder Atkins was showing. Not a great way to start the week. Soon the doors to the library opened and we learned that there are many people who come to RootsTech and schedule their flight home on Monday or Tuesday evening. They come to the library, suitcases in tow, to research right up to the last minute and then head to the airport. We were as busy on Monday, and not quite as much on Tuesday, as we were last Thursday and Friday. We should have asked for more missionaries and staff to come in for those two days as well. I had two more meetings that morning, our Group Visits meeting and our Zone Council meeting. I missed my Group Visits meeting and was late to the Zone Council meeting because I

was helping a lady with research about a relative from South Africa. She had a marriage record of this girl who was married at age 17 to a guy, but it looked like she had had a baby before that but perhaps with a different guy. We were trying to track down her birth record or the birth information of this baby. She kept getting sidetracked every time we found a document and I had to keep trying to bring her back to what we were trying to discover. I have learned that is difficult sometimes here in the library to keep people focused on their goal because they keep veering off constantly when they find something new. They refer to it here in the library as going down a rabbit hole. Anyway

we weren’t able to find everything she was looking for, but she did learn how to find the records that are available and said she would jump into them. So that’s how I ended up late for my zone Council meeting. 

I then jumped in to helping other guests and taking over as floor lead so our AZLs could have lunch. Just before we closed Sister Lee from the Discovery Floor came down to ask how someone could donate a book to the library. We told her that they need to take it to the Guest Services window. About 20 minutes later she came back down and asked if we would come up to take a picture with the couple that was donating the

book. We learned that this couple runs a genealogy business in Shanghai and had created this book that shows the origin of just about every surname in China. Pretty incredible. They were very excited to be able to donate the book and contribute to the library. After taking the picture they invited us to come see them in China someday. That would be cool. We then closed everything down at 6pm.

After that we headed over to the COB to attend a fireside with Sister Susan H. Porter, the Primary General President. She started her talk telling a couple of stories. One was about a senior missionary couple who served in Russia, where her husband, Elder Porter, was the Area President. He said that you couldn’t have paid him enough money to do the job he and his wife had been asked to do, but call me to pay my own way and ask me to love the people and serve them and live amongst them…of course! Great perspective on missionary life. The other story was about Sister Porter’s husband when he was at Harvard getting a doctorate. He was asked to substitute teach a Primary class. Back then Primary 

was on a weekday. He was studying in the library and working hard on his homework so he put off heading to the class until the last minute. He had to hurry across campus to get there and when he did he was late. He got to the door of the Primary room and the children were singing a song he hadn’t heard before, As I Have Loved You. Here is what he said about that moment… “ As I stood there, transfixed in the doorway, the Spirit bore witness that I was looking at the most important class taking place in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that day.” I just had a chat today with one of the other missionaries from our mission who attends our same ward. In Elders Quorum we discussed Sister Amy Wright’s talk from last conference, Abide the Day in Christ. Our class discussion evolved around how do we abide with Christ throughout our day. I didn’t make any comments in class, but after class mentioned to Elder Brown that for me it all goes back to Primary. Those simple things we learned there…love one another, I want to be kind to everyone, what would Jesus do?, pray, He is there, etc…those are the things that help me to abide with Him throughout the day. 

Tuesday was Pday, but we decided to go in to do our Dutch paleography class on the computers in our office cubicle. It was a typical class, but she gave us some wild homework to look up all of the supporting documents for the marriage we had just studied. There are a bunch of those. We had dressed in library attire so that afterwards we didn’t feel weird going down to check on things in the International Zone. As I mentioned before, we found it still pretty busy. Even though it was Pday I found myself answering a bunch of emails and working on prepping for upcoming missionary releases or extensions. We finally headed over to get lunch at the COB just before they closed at 1:30pm. We then stopped off at the NOB to drop off badges and parking passes we had collected from the Deckers and Laura Larsen. After that we headed home. 

We were home only for a little while when I got a text from another missionary, who is finishing his mission early due to health problems, saying that he was home now and we could stop by to get his access badge and parking pass. So off we went. He is the missionary who we were trying to contact forever and were very worried about. When we got to his place we learned that he and his wife actually lived in the basement apartment of the house. It was an Air BnB and she managed it. So she took us upstairs so we could look at it. It is an early 1900’s home and decorated in period furniture. We then went back to the NOB to drop off his badge and then headed home. The rest of the day was finally free for relaxing. 

Wednesday was meeting day again. Mom went walking and took this great picture. I went to the gym to workout. We then got ready and went into the library. We had the New Missionary Orientation meeting at 10:15, which we were early to. That went well. Then we ran off to have lunch at the COB before our 1:00 meeting. When we got there we found John and Vaea having lunch together, so we got some food and sat down with them and caught up on the latest in their lives. The we had to head back to the library and barely made it in time for the next meeting. That meeting was with the library leadership, Lynn Turner and Debbie Gurtler, and it

was mostly a debriefing of RootsTech. We learned that we had a total door count of 7,037 individuals who came into the library during the week. Of those we had a little over 3300 that asked for help using the Get Help system between our floor and the US/Canada floor. Wednesday was indeed the busiest day. They also told us that of the 875 people who responded at the feedback kiosk, 98% gave us positive feedback. That’s pretty amazing. That meeting ended and then we had to head to the NOB for a 3:15 meeting which we found out was changed permanently to 3:30 so we were early. That meeting lasted until around 5:15 and we headed home to relax the rest of the day. 

Thursday was our temple day. We went in to the library at 10am and we had received an email the night before saying that there was a VIP group coming in at 12:30 and they needed some missionaries to come in and help get them signed up and started on FamilySearch. So I had assigned 4 of our missionaries to go up to the main floor computer room and I needed to follow-up to make sure they got the email and knew they needed to go. Happily they had seen the email and were ready to help. Afterwards I received this wonderful email from Rob…”Thank you very much for the opportunity to help with the VIP guests this afternoon.  The experience was very fun and rewarding.  The guest I helped was very interested in probing into his family history and seemed truly excited with what we found as well as the prospect of continuing to collaborate with his family when he returns home.” I spent the rest of the afternoon helping people on the floor and working on some zone leader administrative stuff. We then gathered up Sister Pruner and Sister Docherty and drove to the Bountiful Temple for an endowment session. Afterwards we were all pretty tired so we just went home.

Friday we started a little earlier than we were scheduled at 9:30am since we needed to go to the NOB. We walked over to be there for the Go Forth meeting because we have been assigned two new full time senior missionaries, Sister and Elder Carpenter from Chandler, Arizona. She has lots of experience with FamilySearch and used to speak semi-decent French. He grew up in a Spanish immersion school from 3rd grade on and spoke Spanish very well for many years, but hasn’t used it much in the last 25 years, so he is pretty rusty. They will be a a great addition to our zone. After the meeting we brought them over to the library and gave them an orientation on what we do and when they would be assigned to come in and how the training works. They seemed to be very excited. She wants to work on doing German and French training and he will most likely do the Spanish training, but he doesn’t know what countries he will want to specialize in. They are here for 18 months and we look forward to them being with us until the end of our mission.

At 2:00pm I needed to run off to help the VIP group since they were a group coming from BYU that had international students from all over including one from South Africa. They were late so we sat around waiting for them. We had learned that there were supposed to be 25 of them, 9 being Spanish speakers and then some other languages…Japanese, Portuguese, Tagalog…and so we tried to get some missionaries that knew those languages. When they finally got there only 14 students came and one of those that didn’t come was the South African student. So seeing everything looked good, I headed home since it was our T/R half day. I got home and found Mom relaxing on the couch, so I did the same. I did use the time to draw an alternative idea for our garage placement on our upcoming house in Bellingham.

Saturday Mom went for another walk up around the capital building. The weather has turned a little nicer, but I don’t think Spring is here yet. I was going to go to the gym, but started reading and never made it there. So we went into the library at 10am and were floor leads most of the day. The library had calmed down to normal levels that we have during the winter, so we weren’t super busy. I am part of some online genealogy groups and one of them is for France. I received a notice that someone wanted a document translated so I decided to try. I was running into some difficulties with some of the words so I asked a couple of our missionaries, Elder Campbell and Sister Pete, if they could help. They got sucked in and we spent about 20 minutes together deciphering the document. It was pretty cool once we figured it out. Mom and I ran home for lunch at 1pm and then came back to close down the floor at 6pm. We got home and crashed! I spent the evening watching the BYU basketball game which was fun since they won.

Today is Sunday and we got an hour less sleep because of the time change, but we got up on time and walked up to Church. Mom didn’t have to teach and I got to go to Elders quorum so it was an easy Sunday. Afterwards we walked home and I started this blog post while Mom chatted with kids and grandkids. At 3:30pm we went to the One Heart gathering at the COB. Sister Pete is finishing her mission this coming Tuesday so she was one of the speakers. 

After the meeting we went out the back of the COB to see the finished plaza outside. Here are some pics of what we saw…

We learned that they plan to fill the reflection pond just before conference so we will have to go back again to see that finished product. I am sure it will look very nice. We then walked home and I am finishing this post and then plan to finish proof reading Sister Ganschow’s book. That should keep me busy the rest of the night. 

Life is good. We hope it is the same for you.

Love you all! 

BE GOOD.

Mom and Dad