I’d be a richer woman today if I took potential clients at their word and simply did what they requested. But I don’t, so I’m not.

Say, for instance, someone asked for help in tracking down living descendants of a man who lived in Fillmore, Utah a hundred years ago. That’s a perfectly reasonable request, and someone could log a considerable number of billable hours satisfying it.

But a better researcher would ask early in the work why the client wanted to contact such people. “Because the microfilmed copy of the Fillmore newspaper published by this man is missing a lot of issues. I want to find descendants who have the missing issues.” That is also a perfectly reasonable research technique … except that the run of the newspaper microfilmed by the Utah Digital Newspapers Project came from the editor’s own bound copy. If he didn’t have a full run, the long odds against some grandson having the missing issues is probably not worth your paying me to find that grandson.

An even better researcher would ask what the client hoped to find in those missing issues. “Oh, my grandfather talked about meeting my grandmother while putting on a play with the Mutual Improvement Association, just before he left on his mission. I don’t know when that was, though. I thought maybe, since Fillmore is such a small town, the local newspaper might have published articles about the play and about my grandpa going on his mission, so I would know when that happened.” So, finally understanding what the client really wanted to know, which was quite different from what he had actually asked, I could walk the client over to the Missionary Index (or show him the fantabulous online Early Mormon Missionary Index, if this question were asked today), where he could find the dates of his grandfather’s service almost instantaneously. Then I could introduce him to the forgotten knowledge that the MIA, like all LDS organizations, kept some good minutes of their activities throughout the approximate time of his grandfather’s activity in Fillmore. He could skim through the minutes of the MIA for the approximate time his grandfather was in the play and find references to rehearsing and performing the play, and perhaps other personal mentions of his grandfather that the client didn’t even know to ask about.

And all that would take a very few billable minutes. Still, it’s the right thing to do.

I think about experiences like that when I read letters written to general authorities or to the Church magazines, asking questions that seem pointless, the kinds of questions that should not eat up the time of asking and answering them. Early 20th century members were forever asking questions about the Sons of Perdition, for example – Were there Daughters of Perdition? Is there a chance I could be a Son of Perdition without knowing it? How many are there? After the Judgment Day, will their bodies be destroyed? But I thought matter could not be destroyed – how is that going to work? If they aren’t destroyed, where will they be assigned to live? And on and on.

I don’t know the purpose of asking such questions, other than idle curiosity. But sometimes, I realize that the question somebody asks is not really what they are seeking to know. If I could talk to them, I sometimes would like to peel back the words that cloud the real question, and help the one answering the letter to give a more helpful answer.

For example:

In 1924, Perry Whetton of Ogden asked James E. Talmage this question:

For several weeks now in our priesthood meeting we have had a discussion as to the time the spirit enters the body, whether at the time the mother feels life or at the time of birth. ((As an aside, it’s interesting to me that “at conception” is not among the considered possibilities, when that would certainly be front and center in any debate today, thanks to abortion controversies. But please — this post is not the place for any statement about abortion.)) We have been unable to come to any conclusion whatever, each holding his own particular views. I should like to know for my own benefit as well as the rest of the brethren, what view the church holds on this subject, or your own views, as I think this would help us in clearing up the point.

That seems a strange question to debate over “several weeks” – it may be a legitimate question for some limited amount of discussion, given such scriptural accounts as that in Luke where John the Baptist, still in the womb, “leaped” when he heard his mother greet Mary, who herself was carrying the as-yet-unborn Jesus. But a discussion that carried over from week to week? That seems extreme, and bizarre, and a complete distraction from anything a priesthood quorum should be considering

That is how James E. Talmage took the question. “It is regrettable that such a subject should be a cause of discussion lasting for several weeks in a Priesthood meeting.”

But there was a second question in Bro. Whetton’s short letter, one that Elder Talmage answered as if it had no relation to the first, that suggests to me that the men in Ogden weren’t just debating an unanswerable question (Elder Talmage’s answer to that, by the way was simply “I do not know”). I think the questions were in fact related, and that the second one explains why they were so earnestly debating the first:

Can a child still born be sealed to its parents if they were not originally married in the temple, or will a mother have the privilege of having her still born child in the life to come if the parents were married under the new and everlasting covenant?

What if Brother Whetton’s question about the time at which the spirit enters the body were about more than what that question suggests? What if he and his quorum were really concerned not about a purely philosophical question about when the spirit enters the body, but about grief after the still birth of a child who had, some time prior to birth, “quickened”? If a son or daughter had been alive at some point, but was still born, had the spirit really entered that body? Would that child belong to his or her parents in the eternities?

That’s quite a different question – a personal, emotional question about a very real child, whom the parents had known for months, but whose status they now struggled to understand. Coming to terms with the Church teaching that, in Elder Talmage’s words, “No ordinance work is requisite for or in behalf of a still-born child, under the rule of the Church,” does seem like a valid discussion point (maybe not to occupy a quorum for weeks, but certainly worth some discussion).

Parents, teachers, reference librarians, paid consultants, anyone who answers the questions of others needs to be sensitive to the possibility that what someone asks is not always quite what he or she wants to know.