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