Open Chapel: our program for finding families

Open Chapel is a program we created as a way to interact with community members here in New Zealand where we didn't know anyone.

Everyone loves family. Open Chapel is here to help them find their families, living or dead.

We learned skills along these lines when we were missionaries in the Family History Library in Salt Lake City. They include both research skills and familiarity with various kinds of records. We also have skills pertaining to recording what they find.

Every day we open the doors of the chapel from 10am to noon and invite in anyone who would like to come discover their ancestors. We get them to write down what they already know, then send them off to look up other information and to talk to family members.

Many members of the ward have stepped up to help and so we have been able to give one-on-one attention most of the time. And that is really important for beginners!

A great number of those who have come are Maori. They have their whakapapa at home or someone in the family does or they have memorized it. There are helps online for them and ways to help them, and we're learning right along with them. Fortunately several of our helpers are also Maori.

We are working in conjunction with the local library and genealogical associations.

The church has published a small booklet called My Family. It is this we use to record their first several generations as they work backward in time. There is space for photos and stories and makes a nice keepsake. These booklets are free from the church. And there is an online facsimile at familysearch.org that anyone can use. Unfortunately we don't have enough. We have several thousand on order.

In the church, we believe that families are an essential part of who we are. By finding families, including lost or forgotten members, and recording not only their information but stories and photos, we are helping turn the hearts of the children to their forefathers and vice versa.

For more information see The Family: A Proclamation to the World.

We love families! This is a natural work for us. And we are building community here in a place where we knew no one. It's a joy to come here to the chapel each day. The biggest challenge we have is being in four towns, widely separated, to get this program off the ground!

Integration

We have been on our mission for 7 1/2 months. Each month has led us to new understandings and confidence. The pieces have been collecting. And now we are beginning to experience integration.

One of the beauties of turning 50, I recall, is the feeling that things were beginning to make sense. The parts were starting to add up to a whole. This new mindset resulted in peace as well as a certain headiness around the idea that life could be grasped.

Becoming 60 was like turning a shallow corner. The changes were not abrupt, and the realities of the sixties could be seen from well back in the 50s. The biggest augmentation of 50s life was in realizing we could take control of our affairs when retirement finally became our reality. We figured it would happen when JSL was 67 or 68, but times changed and we were fully retired right after his 66th birthday.

Retirement meant being able to make more choices about our life, such as where in the world to visit, where to settle, when to serve a mission.

The mission came upon us sooner because retirement was sooner. We had been thinking about our mission for years, but by January 2008 we knew we wanted to go to Salt Lake for a family-history mission. One reason was because the economy appeared to be tumbling and house prices were falling, which meant, we felt, that we needed to stay close to home so we could take care of our affairs.

So the events of our 60s started coming at high speed, and we embraced them.

Now, after 7 months of full-time mission life, we find ourselves molding the pieces of our lives - the ones we began to discover as part of a whole more than a decade ago - into just the life we want. Here's where we are today with this creating:

We want to continue to serve in the Family History Library indefinitely. We extended our full-time call until April 30, 2010. But that will hardly be enough.

We could stay here forever - till the end - but we have other work to do. We have books to write, and places to visit, and gardens to plant.

So how to bring it all about...?

By living half a year in Anacortes and half a year in Salt Lake. By having a garden in Anacortes. By living in Anacortes from mid-May to mid-November, or June 1 to November 1, or something like that. By writing books in Anacortes. By indulging widely in the outdoors life. And then by coming back to Salt Lake, serving in the library many days a week, visiting children and grandchildren, enjoying conference and the Choir and evening concerts. And in between by traveling.

It's a beautiful vision to me. I see our moving forward in this dynamic setting for at least another decade.

There is such a balance to this plan! I see a small house in each location. The Anacortes one would have room for a garden, a little greenhouse, and visitors. It would have a view of the sea. The Salt Lake one would be a short bus-ride or walk from Temple Square and would be cozy and have good workspace.

We would write the books we have lined up and continue to be physically active as well as deeply engaged in understanding our kindred dead and helping others to do the same.

This is what the 60s is all about: not only understanding the parts but molding them into a meaningful and dynamic whole.

This understanding is causing a great swell of passion, excitement, rightness, and goodness within us. We will create it, and do it. Amen.

OH NO!

I am grateful for the Holy Ghost in my life. I don't think I would have survived otherwise. I have been saved from errors big and small, and I also think my life has been saved. 

But there's the other side: Sometimes the Holy Ghost has a message for me that are unanticipated and maybe even unwelcome.

Such as what happened to me today.

Elder Lewis and I went to Mormon Tabernacle Choir rehearsal and broadcast, and instead of sitting in our usual place toward the front, we found it reserved for someone and moved toward the next section back.

I slid in next to a youngish man, smiled, sat down...

And he struck up a conversation.

Turns out he is a professor of Yupik languages at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. And he is in Salt Lake working with the translation group translating Gospel Essentials into one of the Yupik languages. He had started it on his own, but finished here, in connection with getting his PhD.

Now it so happens that in my first year as a linguistics graduate student at the University of Arizona I did a paper on Yupik, specifically on Central Siberian Yupik, which is spoken in Siberia and also on some of the islands in the Aleutians.

So we had much to talk about, and did. He illustrated for me some of the Yupik languages, including their prosody. It so happens that the rest of my linguistics career was spent studying prosody...

Then I asked him if he had been to the Family History Library, which he had not. And unfortunately he is leaving in 3 days and won't have time.

The follow up question was whether he had done any family history research, and essentially neither he nor the Yupik people he knows had done any.

This man was warm and friendly and concerned deeply for the language of his people, and the culture that goes with it. But not with his kindred dead.

And then the Holy Ghost spoke to me. It is a work to be done. And it appears that we may be the people to do it.

Until recently I have been compelled within myself to go to set up a regional family history center in Ulan Bataar, Mongolia. I have had no understanding of why, it was just there. Dear Elder Lewis's comment about this compelling desire was, "I'll miss you". 

But just recently it was spoken in our presence that lawlessness had taken over in Mongolia. That did damp down my enthusiasm.

So maybe I had misinterpreted the location for that effort. Or maybe thinking through what it would be like to do a big family-history project like that in Mongolia prepared me to consider such a thing in Alaska.

In any case, many arrows drawn in the past point to it:

1. Study of Yupik and even prosody! 

2. Serving on the International floor at the FHL.

3. Being courageous (?) about learning and speaking languages.

4. Having prepared to serve in the same capacity in Mongolia.

5. Being filled with the Spirit of Elijah.

6. Knowing from my own experience how easily the knowledge of a family can be lost with the passing of just one person, and how rapidly any culture can be lost without knowing the life and struggles of our kindred dead.

7. Knowing that we can't be saved without them, nor they without us - and a whole culture could perish in unbelief without such a work.

Well, we'll see what happens next. Many many layers of effort must be made to bring about such a project, and if we are not on the right track with these thoughts, those efforts will not bear fruit. 

But I have begun. I have checked the library's holding in Yupik genealogies and they are sparse or non-existent (depending on how narrowly Yupik is defined). Next: where are the centers of membership in Alaska?

Crazy or inspired? I don't know - yet. But my friend from the Tabernacle and I really connected, I have his email address, and now it's a matter of letting the Holy Spirit guide.

Ironies Of Family Research

Right now, as part of our training, we are spending nearly all our time on our own family research.

And if you look at the logic of it, that means more and more people all the time: each time we find one new person in our family tree, the door is opened to at least two parents. So the list of people we need to investigate increases rapidly: each success means the list grows longer.

It is delightful to discover the parents of an ancestor. Last week I found Elizabeth Wheeler's parents, Joseph and Sarah Wheeler. And then this week I found Sarah's maiden name: Manners.

I also had great correspondence with someone alive today who is descended from my third great grandfather, Alfred Adams. In fact, I found a whole family of descendants. And one, Cousin Helen Leaver from Colorado, has sent me a great deal of information, including a photo of Alfred's daughter Mary Jane Stottlar. She is a sister of our antecedent Augustus Albert Adams. These are the two children of Hannah Scott's four who lived to adulthood.

So where is the irony? While we are searching out our ancestors, we are unable to see many of our own children and grandchildren! We are learning about those who have died but we the living are mysteries to our descendants. That's ironic.

For this moment in our lives we are fully committed to being here, on location at the great Family History Library, an amazing repository of information about those who have lived and died, not only in the US but also in Europe and in many other parts of the world. And it's growing all the time. The library has thousands of microfilms in drawers that take up a huge amount of floor space and that extend so high that a tall person needs a stool to reach the top.

And just one microfilm contains names, dates, and places of thousands and thousands. Just the other day I was reading a film of the parish records made over the past 600 years from one small town in England, the town of Calne where our ancestors hovered for at least many generations. Just picking out the family names from that one town, I have pages of notes in small writing showing the christenings of babies, and their parents' names, and the date. It is possible to build entire families from such a record, ours and others'. That's how I found the names of Elizabeth Wheeler's parents, and verified her maiden name.

Sometimes after work we see our grandkids who live here in Salt Lake. We are not integral with their lives, though we are trying to get to know them and find things to do with them that they would enjoy.

But it may be that the only way our children are going to know us is if we right our own family histories, especially our own personal histories.

That's a project that would require a great deal of attention, and ironically it would come at the expense of actually spending time with our descendants.

There may be no other way. I don't like it. But I don't have a better solution for now. PL