An Exciting Morning at the Church History Library

This morning was undoubtedly the most exciting morning I've had in the Church History Library.  This must be why I forgot it was my turn to write to the kids and grand kids yesterday.  I just wanted to get in my story about today.

First of all, here's the way the patriarchal blessing requests are handled in our department.  Hundreds of new requests show up in the main queue each morning.  Sister Erickson is the one who then divies them out to the queues of the 14 or so of us who are there each day.  She just puts an equal amount in each person's queue.

So, this morning one of the other sisters in the department comes over to me from another cubicle and says I need to come to her computer and see something.  What I saw on her computer screen was this request from someone in Japan.  It was from Kyle!!! Requesting Grandpa Hegsted's blessing!!!  With a note in the comments box saying something like, "Dear Sister Clements (Grandma),  I hope you are the one to look this up. . ."  He said he was just checking out the features of the church website and realized that this is what I do so he thought he'd test it out.  I was so excited I could hardly stand it.

But there's more to the story.  I wanted to have Sister Erickson transfer that request to my queue so I could look up the blessing, so I went to her and told her what I wanted.  She brought it right up and proceeded to send it to my computer, but then she and I looked further down her list to see if Kyle had sent any more requests.  And what should I see but a request from Shaun!!!  She put this in my queue and I see that he was requesting Grandpa Clements' blessing.  Now, what are the odds of both those requests coming in on the same morning?  That was SO fun.

And just before all this happened I had been sitting there thinking about looking up Grandpa and Grandma Clements' blessings.  For those of you who weren't there, we had a great cousins get together on Saturday at Kelley's.  Sometime during our visit, Kelley or Stacie had asked about getting copies of their blessings for everybody.  I said it would be best if someone requested them through the church website and then could make copies for other people, if they wanted to.  So I was just thinking about that and had just decided I might as well just get them and send them out to whoever wanted them.  So, now I'm asking who of you out there would really like to have and would have a place to put copies of their blessings?  I'll send them to whoever responds and save you the trouble of requesting them.  On the other hand, if any of you do want to request some blessings, be sure to put some little note in the comments box to Sister Clements so that whoever it goes to will give it to me. 

But there's still more to my story.  Lou's desk is just across the cubicle wall from that sister who called me over to see Kyle's request, so, of course, he heard my excited voice and came to see what was going on.  But then he went out into the library and wasn't there to hear about Shaun's, so a short time later I went out to tell him about it.  He was in the library reading room looking at Stacie's mission pictures and journals!!!  Again, on Saturday Stacie told us about someone from the Church History Department calling her years ago and asking if they could come see her.  Because she was the first sister missionary in Greece (and, I'm sure, because her mission president was SO impressed with her) he had asked the Department to have someone contact her to see if she would let them take her journals and pictures to copy and place in the archives.  She was wondering where they would be now and in what form, since they were all given back to her in fine order.  Stacie, your journals are beautiful!  If I kept such a neat-looking and beautifully-written journal maybe I wouldn't mind it being preserved for the ages.  (Louis will send you another email telling you more about them.)  But it was amazing to see how beautifully preserved and filed all those hundreds of pictures and thousands of written pages were.  They are not on the open shelves but are something you can find in the card catalog and request be brought out of the archives, if you are in the library.  Which is same way you would be able to see Grandpa John Scott's journal, if you ever wanted to.

Well, you can see that it was a pretty fun morning.  It was also great to see all of you who were there on Saturday.  I guess I've said it before, but I love this mission that lets me have both kinds of experiences!

This sums it all up:  "Coincidence is when God chooses to remain anonymous."

Love,
Mom, Grandma, Diane

The Falcons Have Flown

We’ve had almost more excitement than we can stand during the past two days.   The falcons have flown!  Bet you didn’t know we were falcon watchers.  It started during our first week here when one of our trainers mentioned the peregrine falcon nest box that is on a ledge near the top of the Joseph Smith Memorial Building and has two web cams in it.  The church, in conjunction with the US Wildlife and several other agencies, has participated in wooing a falcon pair to nest here for many years.  We started checking in on the birds once in a while.  There were four eggs the parents were taking turns sitting on.

About five weeks ago three eggs hatched and the fun of watching them grow began.  Luke gave me the idea to keep the web came open in the corner of my computer desktop and I have done that at work every day since then.  It has been great fun watching them grow, the parents bringing them fresh birds to eat, and them fighting over the food, etc.  We learned that when it is time for them to fledge (see, it has even broadened my vocabulary!) that there would be trained watchers on the plaza watching and ready to rescue them, if necessary.  The brick and glass buildings and traffic of a city pose great hazards as they are learning to fly.  There were even large, yellow traffic signs put up on each street around Temple Square which say, “Falcon Bird Watch – Prepare to Stop.”  This past week the three birds, who are big by now, have been spending a lot of time flapping their wings and looking out of the box.  Just trying to get up courage, I’m sure.

Friday was the day.  When Lou turned the web cam on at 6:15 a.m. one of them was gone.  We watched them off and on as we got ready to go to work, and he saw the second one take off about half an hour later.  I watched #3 all day at work.  She acted very anxious, but just didn’t dare try her wings.  At lunch we sat out on the plaza and talked to one of the watchers and learned that #2 had taken the longest fledgling flight they had ever seen.  She had flown across South Temple Street to the roof of Macy’s in the City Creek Center.  So he had been named Macy.  The first one out was named Primo and he was hanging out on the Church Administration Building just a short distance from the box.

But later that evening I read the sad news that Macy, who had taken several short flights during the day, had then taken off and crashed into the Key Bank high rise building and died.  I was so sad. 

But that’s not the end of the story.  Yesterday morning  #3, who has been named Boxer because she was staying in the box, started acting very strangely.  She was extremely agitated and flailing about in the box.  Finally, the wildlife guy, Bob, who is called a ‘rehabilitator’ carefully took the back off the box from inside the building and reached in with a towel to try to capture her.  Instead, it scared her and she flew out very quickly.  So I was reading blog posts all day keeping track of her.  They later caught her and took her to rehab and even took an x-ray of her gut.  Said she seemed fine but they kept her there overnight and will likely release her sometime today.  So that is a bit of the story of the SLC falcons. I see on the internet that there are similar falcon pairs and boxes and web cams in several cities in the U.S.  Another interesting perk of this mission.

On another subject, I just want to tell you about an interesting experience I had at work this week.  One day I received an email from our dear friend, Monday, in Nigeria.  My kids will remember us talking a lot about Monday and his family.  He is an exemplary church leader and is educated and ambitious, but couldn’t (and still can’t) find work and can barely feed their six kids.   He asked about what we are doing on our mission here, so in reply I told him about what I do in the patriarchal blessing department.  I was surprised to get another email right back from him saying that he wanted to get a copy of his blessing.  I thought, “Oh no, this likely isn’t going to work.”  I have watched for but have never yet seen a request come in from Nigeria, and I didn’t have much faith that the patriarchs would have sent in their blessings regularly.  But I told him just how to go to lds.org and where to  find the request form.  I thought it would be several days before he would get to a computer again so I told him to email me when he sent it so that I could try to arrange to have his request put in my queue.  (There are 16 people in my department all answering requests.)

I was, again, very surprised when I had another email early the next morning saying that he had sent it in.  (I later learned that he has a laptop computer and a modem now. The only problem is that they don’t very often have electricity!  This just blows my mind that he could scrap together enough money for a computer.)  So as soon as I got to work I had my coordinator look for his request and assign it to me.  I was so excited just to see his name, but almost afraid to open it.  Imagine my delight when I saw his blessing appear, already matched by the computer.  The system works!!!  Obviously, it worked because his patriarch had done his job correctly.  The blessing was given way back in 1998.  Monday has been a faithful member since the very early days of the church in Nigeria.  Those faithful members have so little and expect nothing (because the fast offering system didn’t really work there).  Yet they know the gospel is true.

I hope many of you were able to watch Music and the Spoken Word today.  It was their Independence Day special, with the orchestra and bells, and it was magnificent!  What a great way to start this week. Wishing everyone a good 4^th of July.  We have so much to be thankful for in this country.

Our Mission Assignment

Dear Family,

We have decided that, in the spirit of missionary letters, we will send the same letter each week to each family and to Kyle, Drew and Rhett. If we need to add any other emails just let us know.

We have been here just over two weeks now and are finding it really lovely and exciting to live in Salt Lake City. We have already been visited by some of each family except for the Tanners.  That is a real perk of this mission. We live on the 11th floor of an apartment building just one-half block east of the Church Office Building. It is a very nice apartment and the whole west wall of our living room is glass. Here is the view from our west-facing balcony. The Church Office Building is on the left, of course, and if you look carefully at the middle, right side of the photo you see the forest that is on the roof of the Conference Center. The building between here and there is the new Church History Library.

One of the biggest differences that we comment on each day between this mission and our past missions is that everywhere we go, both inside and out, is so beautiful. (There was not a single thing of beauty in Nigeria, except the temple.) The temple grounds, or more specifically the 'Church campus,' is spectactular this time of year with blooming trees and flowers. There are many water features on the quad: water falls, fountains, pools and streams. And our days have been spent mostly in the Joseph Smith Memorial building, which is amazing. Truly, "there is beauty all around."

We have survived our first two weeks! In lieu of the MTC experience the senior couples and single sisters in this mission have two weeks of training in the Joseph Smith building, mostly with a one-on-one trainer, working on just the first 5 generations of our own family history. For both of us that meant just finding sources to prove the events for people we already knew. As you can imagine, that gets a bit tedious after awhile, but certainly not for lack of new stuff to learn.

I was especially fortunate to have Ellen Barzee, from Rexburg, as my trainer. Lou taught her kids in high school and she taught Cheyenne and Natalie in kindergarten. They loved her. As do I, now. She has the patience of Job and great teaching skills.

We even attend church in the Joseph Smith building. The branch we are assigned to is one of two mission branches composed of senior couples and single, senior sisters. Now that's a big change, also! (In Nigeria and in Russia there were 3 or 4 other couples.) You may remember that this building was once the very elegant Hotel Utah built in 1909. The magnificent foyer has marble floors, beautiful rugs, crystal chandliers a mezzanine and the 9 foot statue of Joseph Smith. I remember when I was in high school coming to Salt Lake to Conference with my dear friend, Julina Hart, and visiting her grandfather, then-Elder Joseph Fielding Smith, who lived in the Hotel Utah. Many of the general authorities lived there.) We meet in what I call the Italian Renaissance chapel because of it's architecture. The ceiling and walls are white with ornate wood carving trimmed in gold. Even the organ is white. I'm sure there's no other LDS chapel like it anywhere.

Thursday it was raining so we used the underground parking when we went to the cafeteria for lunch. As we were coming back we saw several of the brethren being driven through the parking lot in a golf cart. Then, a short distance behind them we passed right by Elder Robert D. Hales, who was being pushed in his wheelchair. As dictated by one of the cardinal rules of this mission, we just smiled and said hello and kept walking, but under my breath I added, "cousin." If I had dared to blurt out, "I'm the grand-daughter of your Aunt Edna Hegsted," he may have stopped to talk. But I'm proud to say that I maintained my decorum.

Our most exciting day was last Friday when, having completed our training zone, we were given our assignments of where we will be serving. There are 22 different zones in this Church and Family History Mission, each doing entirely different work, but you don't normally move between zones . We are assigned to work in the Church History Library (not to be confused with the Family History Library). Yeah!! That was what we had hoped for. More specifically, we will be working on the first floor with We will now begin another two weeks of training, but this time it will be on what we will be working with.

We are loving this place and being missionaries again. We especially love that you can come visit us. Everyone, have a good week.