We usually speak in terms of taking the gospel to the world. But some in our history came to where the gospel could be found, without waiting for it to find them.

Marina Marazzi was born in Rome, Italy in 1910. Directed by Lorenzo Snow, there had been a little bit of missionary activity in the 1850s in the Italian Piedmont region (bordering Switzerland), but no missionaries had come to Rome then, and except for the occasional tourist or student, no Latter-day Saints had been in Italy for decades.

Just before Marina’s 10th birthday, the Marazzi family (parents Duilio and Annita, and Marina’s younger brother Sergio) emigrated from Rome to New York City. It’s hard to know just what her life was like in New York in the 1920s and ’30s, but perhaps it was a little easier than the lives of most immigrants – Duilio was able to support his family as a distributor of Italian movies without needing his wife and daughter to contribute to the family’s income. Duilio also published a book in 1934 about his experiences in the movie world, suggesting a significant level of family literacy, and perhaps an acquaintance with successful and interesting people.

The Church was well established in New York City long before the Marazzi family’s arrival. Branches were organized in both Manhattan and Brooklyn (not directly in Queens, where the Marazzis lived), but the missionaries didn’t find them there.

In 1940, Marina Marazzi – by then using her anglicized name of Marie – was 30 years old, and single. She set out on a cross-country tour to see the sights of her adopted country and, without her being aware of it, that tour would take her the rest of the way to finding the Gospel that had not yet found her.

Waiting in Salt Lake City with a little time before she needed to catch her bus to San Francisco, Marie toured Temple Square. Her guide that day was Rose Bywater Valentine, who had served with her husband Hyrum in the Swiss Mission during World War I. Marie had only a few minutes to spend on Temple Square, but Sister Valentine made a deep impression on her – so much so that she felt she had to apologize to the tour guide for having to leave the group before the tour had finished. Sister Valentine urged her to stop quickly in the Bureau of Information and pick up some pamphlets about the Church, and Marie did so just before boarding her bus.

As the bus pulled out of Salt Lake, Marie began to read. And read. And read. She read every word of the tracts she had picked up. She asked everyone on the bus if they were Mormons, and continued to seek information in San Francisco. When she returned to New York, she found the missionaries and the branch.

Six months later a letter arrived at the Bureau of Information on Temple Square, from Marie Marazzi in New York. She gave the date of her visit to Salt Lake, and described the woman who had been her guide, and asked the Bureau to pass her letter to that woman whose name she did not know.

“I am happy to tell you,” she wrote, “that I am a Mormon! My mother and I have recently been baptized members of the Church ((Marie’s father, although so friendly to the Church that he appears in photographs with Manhattan Branch members, did not join the Church in his lifetime; neither did her brother Sergio.)) – all the result of the literature I picked up at the information desk as you told me. When you bore your testimony in the Tabernacle to our group that morning, your countenance just glowed. I knew I could never forget it.”

Marie became an enthusiastic member of the branch in Manhattan – within the first few years of her membership, she served as a counselor in the YWMIA presidency, and as teacher to the Mia Maids. She headed a committee of young women who located and reactivated members of the Sunday School. She frequently went on “splits” with the missionaries. She became a stake missionary.

In 1942, Virginia Rand Shelley, a young ballerina with the Radio City Ballet Corps, stepped into the Manhattan Branch building just before Sunday School. She was not LDS, but her mother was, and Virginia had grown up in California listening to broadcasts of the Tabernacle Choir. Virginia met Marie Marazzi that day, and the two became lifelong friends. “She assisted in giving me a well grounded understanding of the LDS lifestyle. her unwavering testimony rubbed off on me, and I am grateful for this fine beginning,” recalled Virginia in an autobiographical account.

Marie lived until 2001. Other than recognizing that Marie had temple ordinances performed for her brother and father as soon as possible after their deaths, I have no clue as to Marie’s life during her last 50 years, except for that trace of her friendship with the dancer Virginia Rand Shelley. Marie did not marry, so there are no children or grandchildren – and no LDS nieces or nephews or cousins – to enter information about her in Family Search (I have posted a picture of her there). Perhaps records of her New York branch would tell us something. And Virginia Rand Shelley’s writings underscore another value of life writings – not only do you record the story of your own life, but you help to preserve memories of those who might otherwise vanish into the past.

A few months from now, a temple will be dedicated in Marie’s native Rome. She couldn’t wait for that. She found the gospel on her own, by coming to it rather than waiting for it to find her.

Photographs: Marina (Marie) Marazzi, in about 1951; a group in front of the Manhattan Branch building, with Marie on the far right and Virginia Rand Shelley on the other side of the sailor.