One of the distinctive features of Mormonism is our claim that the authority to preach, bless, speak, and otherwise act in the name of God comes from an exactly traceable pathway from John the Baptist (in the case of the Aaronic priesthood) and Christ’s ordination of the apostles (in the case of the higher priesthood), the ordination of Joseph Smith by certain of those resurrected bearers of priesthood, and through an unbroken and precisely definable chain from Joseph Smith down to the rawest young deacon ordained this week in the farthest corner of the church.

That is to me to me something special, something definable and different and demonstrable, that all Mormon priesthood bearers should be humbled by yet proud of, something you all should be aware of and ready to demonstrate when asked. (more…)

Today, a branch organized without local priesthood leadership – with children organized into Primary and women into Relief Society, but with no functioning priesthood quorum, no assignments or leadership roles for the men who attended church regularly – would be remarkable, if it existed at all. Yet outside the western Mormon region, that was the norm until surprisingly far into the 20th century: Men in branches in the Midwest, or the eastern states, or in the South, or along the Pacific coast, or outside of the U.S., might serve as local missionaries or teach Sunday School or be MIA officers, but there were noorganized quorums and no responsibility for local administration.

The first elders’ quorum organized outside the intermountain west was that of Chicago, sometime in the late 1920s; I have not yet found enough about that quorum to write about it. The second such quorum, however, in Washington, D.C., leaves enough mark on history to see how those men conceived of their quorum duties. (more…)

Nothing to Contribute

The train robber suddenly appeared as the passengers were retiring for the night.

(more…)

The dear old time Relief Society, caring for the health of the people … champions of the Word of Wisdom … trainers of professional nurses … purveyors of electrical belts and radioactive water jugs …

(more…)

The following two riddles are from a church magazine; I’ll give the citation after we’ve played around a while.

The rules are that you can answer as many parts as you want to, but please give a scripture citation for each part you do answer. Online scriptures are here.

(more…)

The 1912 course of study for priests (Aaronic Priesthood) was entitled First Steps in Church Government. Lessons focus on the basic functioning of the church organization on the personal level (“”Moral and Spiritual Duties,” “Citizenship in Church Government”), the family level (“Home Education”), the quorum level (“Priesthood and Office,” “The Lord’s Supper”) and the ward level (“Revenue for Church Government,”“Help for the Poor and Unfortunate”). It seems to be a well-organized plan for initiating young boys and men into the roles they will play in a church where lay members are responsible for all functions.

This is all very interesting to me, who despite a lifetime in the church, a Melchizedek Priesthood-exercising father (now deceased), and the filling of a full time mission, has never really felt like I had much of a grasp on the nuts and bolts of priesthood government. (more…)

Other than the Young Women’s “Don’t; at least not yet,” I don’t recall ever hearing a church lesson on human sexuality; so the number as well as the half-candid, half-veiled voice of the lessons I’m finding in periodicals of a century ago are both surprising and surprisingly charming to me. This mother education lesson from 1917, for instance, suggests a way in which Relief Society women can instruct their very young children in the most elemental facts of life while preserving the private nature of the topic.

What to Say in Telling the Story of Life’s Renewal.

by Lucy Wright Snow
(Relief Society Magazine, May 1917, 259-261)

The subject of what to say to children in telling the story of life’s renewal is so big and of such vast importance that the only way to do justice to it is to treat it religiously. (more…)

(Keepa is not the place for a discussion of partisan politics, and I appreciate your cooperation in avoiding that kind of discussion, although this post might seem to offer an opening for it.)

The coincidence of yesterday’s receipt of a Mormon-flavored anti-Obama scaremail and my running across an article in the 1917 Relief Society Magazine prompts this exploration of an odd little document I first saw many months ago. If the post is too long, you can safely skip the block quotations. (more…)

[I have to read so much anti-Mormon rancor in my work that I’m a real sucker for any kind word someone had for us in the 19th century.

Thomas J. Berry, born at Lee Valley, Hawkins Co., Tennessee, in 1844, was a farmer and sometime Justice of the Peace. He married Cornelia Trent in 1881, and they became the parents of at least three children, one of whom, George Leonard, a free-thinker like his father, was a labor activist in the pressmen’s and railroad workers’ unions, served with the rank of major in World War I, was appointed by Woodrow Wilson as a member of the American Commission negotiating the peace treaty at the end of that war, and was appointed by Tennessee’s governor to serve out the term of a senator who died in office. (more…)

Fully organized Relief Societies outside of the stakes of the Intermountain West were unusual at the turn of the 20th century. One of the first mission-wide Relief Societies organized and fully staffed by local sisters rather than the wives of missionaries was inaugurated in the New Zealand Mission in 1901. There mission president John Ephraim Magleby called three Maori sisters – Takare Aperata Paewai Duncan (1868-abt. 1950), president; Mere Te Hauerangi Meha (1858-1943), 1st counselor; and Ani Matenga Renata (1856-1921), second counselor – to organize Relief Societies in the branches of the mission

Very few train tracks had been laid in those early years, and roads were often poor. Where roads could be depended upon, the three women traveled by horse and buggy; in rougher regions, they traveled by horseback. The distances sometimes required that they camp by the roadside for one or two nights between branches. Their work was two-fold: to teach Gospel principles and anchor the women more solidly in their faith, and to teach practical skills of cooking and the production of clothing in the changing economy of the island, and sanitation and healthcare required by modernization.

(more…)

First Lessons

“What is a man-of-war?” said a teacher to his class.

“A cruiser,” was the prompt reply.

“What makes it go?”

“Its screw, sir.”

“Who goes with it?”

“Its crew, sir.”

(more…)

The missionary of 1936 went forth with encouragement to use his individual talents in ways that, in my experience, were encouraged in theory but not actually supported in practice in my missionary generation. This lesson from the 1936 missionary prep Sunday School class suggests ways individual talents might be used, and outlines the resources available to the modern missionary. And with it, yes, Keepapitchinin is publishing yet another book list! Whoo-hooo!

Missionary Tools

A well stocked mind, an understanding of the Gospel, pleasant gentlemanly behavior, genuine interest in others’ welfare, and a strong desire to be a worthy messenger of eternal truth, are necessary assets of the successful missionary. The mind that directs the use of the tool is always greater than the tool itself. (more…)

The island of Hikueru, one of the atolls of the Tuamotu archipelago (the same island group that was home to Pahoa a Tahiaroa) is a rocky atoll in French Polynesia – it is a build-up of volcanic rock so shallow that its highest point is only 30 feet above sea level. Most of the island is so low that a deep lagoon fills the interior, leaving only a narrow rim of dry land above water.

In 1903, the island supported a small permanent village consisting of some native huts and frame buildings – including both LDS and RLDS chapels, as well as one Catholic and one Protestant church – and a solid stone government building built on a heavy concrete foundation. By contrast, the Mormon elders’ home was built on a foundation of four-foot-high coral pillars, allowing the occasional high sea to wash underneath the building. There was a thin layer of sandy soil on the island, which had been planted with coconut trees. The only fresh water was rainwater, which was caught in barrels and which seeped into shallow cisterns dug into the sand. (more…)

Who: Western Historian William MacKinnon
What: Lecture, “The Utah War as Context for Mountain Meadows,” and signing copies of his new book: At Sword’s Point, Part 1: A Documentary History of the Utah War to 1858
Where: Sam Weller’s Bookstore, 254 S. Main, Salt Lake City, Utah
When: Friday, September 26, 2008, 6:00 p.m.

This event is free and open to the public.

(more…)

Gospel Restoration Themes was a manual prepared by the Deseret Sunday School Union Board in November, 1936, as a study guide for prospective missionaries – a sort of Preach My Gospel for an earlier generation. Most of the chapters are general subjects for gospel study: “Revelation,” “Faith and Works,” “Marriage”; a few lessons concern topics that were real hot-button issues for the day, but which have since lapsed into virtual insignificance: “Does the Presidency of the Church Descend from Father to Son?” and “Was the President of the Reorganized Church Ordained Properly?”

Some of the lessons also deal with the nuts and bolts of missionary labor. Two of them, “The Missionary’s Day” and “Missionary Tools,” are both familiar to anybody who has been or knows a missionary today, and yet different enough that they show us how times have changed. (more…)

We have discussed Beneficial Life and its connection with the church, and its heavy advertising on the back covers of church magazines, in an earlier post. For your entertainment and thought, here is a year’s worth of their advertising (1929-1931).

First we have two ads that make the purchase of Beneficial Life insurance practically the religious duty of every Relief Society leader –
(more…)

.
.
Here are snapshots of Latter-day Saint branches in 1938. In a few cases, these may have been the last photos before branch families were scattered by the impending war.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Prague, Chechoslovakia
.

(more…)

What the Little Bird Said

A little bird sat on a telegraph wire,
And said to his mates, “I declare
If wireless telegraphy comes into vogue,
We’ll all have to sit on the air!”

Couldn’t Fool Her.

First Society Lady – “That pretty baby we’ve just passed is mine.”

Second Society Lady – “How ever did you know?”

First Society Lady – “I recognized the nurse.”

(more…)

John Edward Rocha was born in Portugal (probably in the Azores) in 1876 and emigrated to Hawaii in 1880 with his parents Manuel and Elzida Rocha. He married Mary Carvalho, Hawaiian-born daughter of Portuguese immigrants, in about 1905, and in rapid succession four children (sons Marseillaise/Marcy and Harold, and daughters Cecilia and Olga) were born.

Rocha was a tailor, and operated his own designing and tailoring business in Honolulu, where he employed several other tailors. On returning to his business one day in 1913, he found one of his employees mending an old coat. Rocha was angered by the sight – his business served some of the finest families in Honolulu, and he ordered the employee to drop what he was doing. They were not in the business of patching and mending old clothes, he said. (more…)

This is necessarily a long post — treat it like 48 mini-posts, and skip around to glimpse what was happening in the American missions, 1910:

Alabama

Writes Elder J.M. Swapp, “While I was canvassing a store, one of the clerks was interrupted in his revilings against the ‘Mormons’ by a traveling man who said, ‘Gentlemen, I have been in Salt Lake City – have read their various books, and am here to tell you that they are not the kind of people you think. Instead of being of vicious habits as you suppose, they are kind-hearted, virtuous, and honest people who worship God seven days a week and not Sunday only as we!’”

(more…)

St. Mark’s Cathedral is one of the loveliest old landmarks in Salt Lake City. Designed by Richard Upjohn (founder of the American Institute of Architects) and built of locally quarried red sandstone, it has served Utah’s Episcopal Church since its dedication in 1874, the first permanent Protestant building in Utah. The Right Rev. Daniel S. Tuttle, its first bishop, described it as “plain, but beautiful, and complete in its appointments.”

Plain it may have been in 1874; it has since been embellished with dazzling stained glass windows – some of them by Tiffany – and with the finest wood and metal work. Its organ is a jewel. Yet St. Marks retains the pioneer simplicity that earned its place on the National Register of Historic Sites. (more…)

David Roberts, “The Awful March of the Saints,” American Heritage 58:3 (Fall 2008), 28-31.

The current issue of American Heritage magazine, not yet available on the internet (please do not post links to copyright-violating scans that interested Latter-day Saints sometimes post), contains a short article by David Roberts about the Martin and Willie handcart companies, a foretaste of his just-published Devil’s Gate: Brigham Young and the Great Mormon Handcart Tragedy (my copy of which I expect to be delivered by Amazon this afternoon). (more…)

I have put up a sidebar link to “Why I chose to convert to Islam,” a YouTube video created by my niece. Because it’s an unusual feature for Keepa and comment might be irresistible, I’ve opened this post to keep off-topic comments from other posts.

She is my niece, and I love her.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, mastermind behind the master mind of Sherlock Holmes, famously pitched into the Mormons in his A Study in Scarlet in 1887:

The supply of adult women was running short, and polygamy without a female population on which to draw was a barren doctrine indeed. Strange rumours began to be bandied about – rumours of murdered immigrants and rifled camps in regions where Indians had never been seen. New women appeared in the harems of the elders – women who pined and wept, and bore upon their faces the traces of unextinguishable horror. Belated wanderers upon the mountains spoke of gangs of armed men, masked, stealthy, and noiseless, who flitted by them in the darkness. These tales and rumours took substance and shape, and were corroborated and recorroborated, until they resolved themselves into a definite name. To this day, in the lonely ranches of the West, the name of the Danite Band, or the Avenging Angels, is a sinister and an ill-omened one.

Some 46 years later, Doyle visited Salt Lake City on a lecture tour of the United States. (more…)

Here’s another opportunity for those lucky enough to be in Salt Lake City next week: The Utah state history annual meeting is being held on Thursday and Friday (September 11-12) at the Salt Lake Public Library. Most sessions concern Utah rather than Mormon history; there are, however, two sessions on polygamy (panel discussions, one on history and one on law, with panelists Martha Bradley, Carmon Hardy, Michael Homer, and others) and a session given by Ron Walker and Glen Leonard concerning Massacre at Mountain Meadows.

The real novelty of this year’s meetings, however, is the premier presentation of a new play by James Arrington (“Here’s Brother Brigham,” “Farley Family Reunion,” and other regional favorites). His “The March of the Salt Soldiers” will be presented on Thursday, September 11, at 4:00, in the Salt Lake Public Library theater. (more…)

6:40 – Okay, so my first attempt at live-blogging has fallen flat, for technical reasons. I could get an internet connection in the library foyer, but I can’t get one in the auditorium where the discussion is to be held. So … I’ll “blog” to myself now, and post it delayed as soon as I can.

There are 150 people here already, by actual count. Many familiar faces, and a lot I don’t know. The auditorium is filling up fast, and people keep asking if the two seats next to me are taken. (I’m up in the balcony, as far in the corner as I can get.) When I tell people they’re welcome to sit there but that I’ll be typing the whole time, so far everyone has gone on hunting seats elsewhere. (more…)

Tonight:

Massacre at Mountain Meadows:
A Scholarly Discussion
September 5, 2008 | 7pm
Main Auditorium
Salt Lake City Public Library
(200 East/400 South)
Free and Open to the Public

** Live-Blogging by Keepapitchinin and Juvenile Instructor **

(more…)

May 2nd, 1946.

To Presidents of Stakes and Bishops of Wards.

Dear Brethren,

Inquiries received at the office of the First Presidency disclose the fact that there is a divergence of opinion and varied practices among ward officers with respect to the kind of music, if any, that should be rendered during the administration of the sacrament. (more…)

The Czechoslovakian Mission was opened on 24 July 1929, after years of prayers and letters by a woman and her two daughters who had joined the Church elsewhere and returned to Prague (theirs is a marvelous story; I may blog it soon, with pictures). The missionaries’ first task was to learn Czech, a difficult and slow process for most of the first eight elders. Even before they could speak with their contacts, though, they were distributing leaflets with the Articles of Faith on one side, the text below on the other side, with an invitation to attend meetings at a given address. (more…)

Hettie Hilda Harper of Dudley Port, near Birmingham, England, was born to an LDS father and a non-member mother. Her mother must have been supportive of her father’s religion, though, because Hettie was baptized at age 8. Several of the family’s children died young, leaving a gap of about ten years between Hettie and her two younger sisters; Hettie herself was only 18 when their mother died in 1922.

In 1924, concerned about the training of her little sisters, and desiring “to bring my sisters up as my dear mother would have liked to bring them up, had she been permitted to live,” Hettie began to hold a sort of a “home Primary” in her family’s rustic kitchen for the two little girls and two of their friends. (more…)

Your goal in the early stages of genealogical research should be to get as complete a picture of your recent family generations as possible, taking you back at least as far as 1930, when the federal census and other public records kick in.

Most people can get a general outline of family names and relationships by talking to living family members and looking at records available around your home, as we talked about in Lesson 2. If you are an occasional Keepa commenter and have not been able to get at least the names of your grandparents and some of their brothers and sisters, feel free to write to me – keepapitchinin at AOL dot com – for help. I can’t do the research, but perhaps I can make suggestions based on your particular circumstances. (more…)