Featured on my Facebook page, and posted here for archiving.

The office of Mission Recorder was an important one: In the decades before the Presiding Bishop’s Office developed a central system for keeping track of Church members and their membership records, the mission offices was the chief place where the status of members outside the stakes was recorded. Mission Recorders received reports from branches and missionaries, and entered blessings, baptisms, confirmations, ordinances, and other personal data – almost always by hand – in large ledgers. These records were important to members moving to places where they were not known, or who sought temple recommends and patriarchal blessings. The Recorder created the official record, ensured its accuracy, and kept it up to date and indexed.

Which leads us to this page in the official mission records of the Southern States Mission, from 1921 to 1940. Once these printed ledgers came into use in the 1910s, until they were phased out a half century later, every mission record had such a page, where the Mission Recorder accepted responsibility for the books for a time, before turning them over to a successor.

Can you read the names? There’s an occasional Robert and Lloyd and Frank and Heber, but those names are far outnumbered by Leona and Mabel and Thelma and Edith and Fanny and Lavinia and Florence and Freda and Virginia and Rose and Rhoda and Ellen and Jennie and May and Hazel. More often than not, it was the sisters who, before their missions, had worked in offices and taught school and organized libraries, who had the most legible handwriting and were accustomed to detailed and accurate bookwork. It’s the sister missionaries to whom, more often than not, we owe our records of early 20th century Church members.