8 thoughts on ““I Take Up My Pen”: Eastern States Relief Society, 1939”

1. Well, it only took a quick search for “Mission Relief Society President” to discover that this was (is?) something I should have noticed, but somehow I was ignorant of the existence of mission Relief Societies until now. I suppose they are unnecessary in places with plenty of stakes.

2. Right. In the days when this letterhead was used, missions covered areas outside of stakes — there was nothing like today’s organization of missions overlaying stakes. When a stake was organized, its territory was carved out of the mission, and the mission no longer had any connection to the the stake. So a Mission Relief Society (each of the auxiliaries, really) served the same function as a stake Relief Society, coordinating the work of the several branches.

3. Where districts were organized within a mission, would they also have had a district Relief Society president?

   The New York Stake was created in 1934 and extended into Long Island, Westchester County, and New Jersey. But the mission would still have covered branches in large areas of surrounding states.

   I served in same mission (renamed New York New York City) beginning in 1978, and at the time, the mission included three stakes in New York (New York, Plainview, and Yorktown), two stakes in New Jersey (Morristown and New Brunswick), but still had direct jurisdiction over one branch (Bermuda) not yet included in a mission. The mission assigned a missionary couple to serve as branch president and (I think) Relief Society president in Bermuda. There were no proselyting missionaries.

4. Left Field, yes, there were district RS presidencies, in some times and places. Sometimes, and in many places, there weren’t enough members living near enough to each other to be so fully organized. It was also a little harder for women to travel long distances for auxiliary presidency duties than it was for priesthood district officers, which usually included full time missionaries even when local men were also involved. By the time an area could have so many members so well organized to have both mission and district auxiliary presidencies, it was time to organize a real stake.

5. Thank you, Ardis.

   And I’m sure you figured out that I meant to say that Bermuda was not included in a stake.

6. Except, Ardis, when the powers that be decide to dissolve stakes and create mission districts again. Here in New York (which I arrived in about the time that Left Field was finishing his mission) there have been several mission districts–three or four in the NY South Mission. They were organized nearly as fully as stakes, although there were rarely anywhere close to twelve members of the high councils. And except for a short time at the beginning (in 1991), all of the leadership has been drawn from the area–if not from within the boundaries of the districts. The last of them to be absorbed back into a stake was the Brooklyn North District, in about 2012.

7. I think almost-current history is very different from almost-not-quite-modern history, though. You’d had a stake and everybody knew how they functioned and the Church recognized the benefits of the stake organization and had no question that it could or should function just as well in New York as in Salt Lake. That’s very different from a time when the Church was barely beginning to work through the idea of organizing stakes with (gasp) local leadership in (gasp) the East. It all seems so easy now, to modify and adapt when conditions aren’t quite ideal (e.g., too few high councilmen), when in 1939 they were inventing it as they went and really had no idea how it would work or whether local people were up to the task.

8. And that’s the East Brunswick Stake, if I can keep correcting myself.

   A similar thing that Mark describes was done soon after I lived in Detroit. I was a member of the “inner city” Detroit Ward around 1992-3. The ward covered most of the city and up a little above 8-Mile in places. We met in a remodeled Greek Orthodox church with a balcony and dome. After about a year I moved to a different part of the city that was part of a suburban ward. Some time after that as I remember, they divided the Detroit Ward into about five branches meeting in various locations around the city and combined them with two previously existing branches from the adjoining stake to make a district. The idea being that the district would grow into a stake. Looking at lds.org, it doesn’t appear that worked out. There is a ward meeting in the old Orthodox Church, and a couple of branches, all belonging to the same two stakes that existed when I was there.

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