This post has some factual gaps that I was unsuccessful in filling in during a trip to the Church History Library this morning. I decided to go ahead and post anyway and make this both the story of a little-known Latter-day Saint and also a sort of lesson in the detail work involved in writing history, especially when telling stories that have not previously been part of our familiar story.

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Since 18__ [last quarter of the 19th century], the Historian’s Office has kept a register of missionaries sent out to carry the gospel to the world. Although it records a minimum of information – name, residence, name of mission, dates of setting apart and return – the register is a useful tool. You may know that your great-grandfather served a mission in Denmark; the register will give you the precise dates of that mission, allowing you to focus your research in mission records on the right time period.

The register is not complete, however. It does not necessarily include missionaries who left from their homes in, say, Arizona or the Mexican colonies without stopping first in Salt Lake City. And it does not include “local” missionaries, men and women called not by General Authorities from the stakes, but my mission presidents in the various missions. Local missionaries served within their own missions. Local missionaries did not receive a missionary certificate from the Church, although they may have received some sort of written authority from the mission president. Local missionaries are not listed in the Church’s general missionary register until sometime in the middle of the 20th century.

That means that many missionaries who served full time missions for many months or even years are not necessarily remembered for the service they rendered. Many of these, both elders and sisters, were converts themselves, who accepted missions soon after baptism. They all served without having gone to the temple. Many of them men served as Aaronic priests, without having yet received the Melchizedek priesthood.

Some of them were pioneers of the Church in their own regions.

One such pioneer was Svatoslav Jan Polivka, of Pelhrimov, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic). Svatoslav had studied the Bible since he was a small boy. When he could not find a church that met his expectations, he gathered around him some like-minded friends and founded his own religious group.

In 1934, without ever having heard of the Latter-day Saints or having become aware that a mission had opened in Prague a few years earlier, Svatoslav discovered a copy of the Book of Mormon, in Czech, for sale in a bookstore. Intrigued, he asked his wife to buy it for him for a Christmas present. She did.

Svatoslav studied the book and found that it taught some of the same principles he believed in but had not found in the churches he had visited. He began to preach from the Book of Mormon to his fellow believers.

In 1935, he met Elder Calvin D. McOmber of Idaho, serving as a missionary in the Czechoslovakian Mission. It didn’t take long for Svatoslav to ask for baptism. It took only a little longer than that for him to convert his wife, and two members of his congregation.

By the end of 1935, Svatoslav wanted to devote more of his time to missionary work. His wife, a graduate of the Prague Conservatory, was well established as a teacher of music, and together they decided that if Svatoslav was deemed worthy to be called as a local missionary, she could support the two of them while he served. Svatoslav was set apart as a missionary on February 16, 1936, by Arthur Gaeth, the president of the mission.

I do not yet know how long Svatoslav served, or what became of him in later life. I do not know the name of his wife, whose own willingness to be the family breadwinner made it possible for him to serve. But I do know, whether his name is recorded in the central files of the Church, or not, that Svatoslav Jan Polivka was the first Czech convert of this dispensation to serve as a full time missionary.

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President Gaeth had a picture taken with his missionaries shortly before he returned home from his own long, long mission – he had begun serving as a missionary in Europe as a young single elder, and had stayed to become the first president of the Czechoslovakian Mission. He had found his wife there, and his first children were born while he served. In this picture, he is seated in front, his wife Martha to his right (your left), and Brother Wallace F. and Sister Martha Toronto, succeeding the Gaeths in the mission work, are to his left. His oldest child, Grant Ivins Gaeth, stands next to him. And at the end of the back row, in the upper right hand corner of the picture, there is a man with glasses and a beard. That is Svatoslav Jan Polivka, standing with all the other missionaries of that mission.

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I have not been able to find Svatoslav in Family Search – I’ll be delighted if one of you can – so I do not yet know how old he was, or even the name of his wife who made it possible for him to serve. There are mission records that will almost certainly fill in those gaps, but I wasn’t able to access them on my trip to the Library this morning. I will, and I’ll eventually update this post. But I decided to share it now, incomplete as it is, because the man has waited long enough to be acknowledged as a pioneer and as a full time missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and I didn’t want to make him wait any longer.