Colin left this as a comment on last week’s post about the rediscovery of lost records. It was so good that I didn’t want you to miss it buried as a comment, and I asked him for permission to post it as a guest post. Thank you, Colin.

-oOo-

It was a bit of a disappointment being called to serve a mission in Sydney, Australia. I’d lived all my life in the island state of Tasmania, and serving in a place just a two-hour flight away was… Well… I wanted to go to Canada!

I was in the last eight months of my mission, and had pretty much gotten over the disappointment, when I was called to serve in the mission office. It was a nice change, and I had a great companion, and we got into all sorts of mischief. On one particular P-Day we decided to rummage through one of the old storage cupboards, and came across a whole heap of old records and publications from the Australia East Mission.

We started flicking through them, when my companion asked if I was related to a person he’d just come across with the same somewhat uncommon surname as mine. I was a bit shocked to hear my father’s name, and details of him being ordained to the office of teacher. Well, the floodgates were opened; we spent the rest of the day compiling a stack of photocopies of my family history! The record of Dad’s baptism, including the name of the elder who performed the ordinance. The mission record of that elder, including description of height, eye colour, hair colour, occupation prior to mission, home address, etc. All sorts of Tasmania District (nowadays two small stakes) news; my uncles’ and aunts’ baptisms, and various callings, members births, deaths and marriages.

Most interesting, however, was getting a clearer understanding of how I ended up with two American uncles! Those district news editions also reported the comings and goings of members, and Missionaries returning home. When you see that Elder Such-and-Such is returning home to the US, on the Steamship Lollipop (?!), and is also accompanied by Sister (Grandmother’s maiden name), the penny dropped! Sadly, the second penny dropped when, in a much later edition, it was announced that my grandmother has returned by steamship from the US with two young sons.

My companion and I were both quite teary by the end of that day. But what was really interesting, however, was when I showed this all to my mission president. He said, “It’s not every missionary that gets to do so much of their own family history whilst on a proselytising mission!”

And the third penny dropped. Just prior to leaving on my mission, I received my patriarchal blessing. In it it said that I would be involved in family history. I laughed (and doubted) at the time, because our family were a bunch of crazy genealogists, and I wasn’t having anything to do with it! It had “all been done” anyway; predominantly by one person.

That grandmother!

My mission president chuckled and said, “You were told you’d do ‘family history’, not genealogy! And you sure found some!” It was a story my father, uncles and aunt knew, but this skeleton had been locked away from my generation. I literally unlocked the closet.