Finding ancestors
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SOUTH WEBER, Utah — Comfortable with computers and obedient to their stake president, youth in the South Weber Utah Stake researched some 10,000 family names in 2005.
With their parents, other adults and young singles helping, they turned their hearts to the forefathers.
The wave of youthful enthusiasm continued through preliminary temple work for the many ancestors, presenting a significant amount of temple work for adults of the stake to complete.
In their ardor, the youth taxed the resources and pleased the leaders of both the Ogden Family History Center and the Ogden Utah Temple.
Elder Gordon T. Watts, temple president and former member of the Second Quorum of the Seventy, opened the temple on Monday, Jan. 16, a holiday, for proxy baptisms. Ordinance workers, he said, were thrilled to come in on their day off to take part.
"I have never seen anything organized so well, or the young people so reverent," Elder Watts said. "About 350 youth participated in the project." He said they completed about 5,100 baptisms."
He expects this experience to influence young people to go on missions, be married in the temple, and be temple attending people. "We are so delighted.
"It started with the vision of the stake president (David G. Crittenden), who saw that one way to help our young people stay close to the gospel and be close to their ancestors and have love for them was to have them seek out (their ancestors). It has just been a miraculous experience for people to find their ancestors."
He tied the project to the invitation of the First Presidency to read the Book of Mormon. "I feel like the prophet is preparing us to be better members of the Church with strong testimonies to withstand the fiery darts of the adversary, because in reading the Book of Mormon, people are doing more in the temple."
"I don't think this is the end; it is only the beginning."
With President Watts' approval, the stake youth event, which had been building since the first of May, culminated with three days of doing baptisms and confirmations in behalf of departed ancestors. While school was out Saturday, Jan. 14; Jan. 16, a holiday; and Jan. 17, a teacher's preparation day; groups of youth rotated through the font, said Chris Udy, a former bishop's counselor who is chairman of the effort, called the Elijah Project.
"It took a lot of coordinating but everything went well," said Brother Udy. "It was really a spiritual experience in that font. There was so much emotion that fathers baptizing sons and daughters (for their ancestors), were breaking down in tears and not able to get through the baptismal prayer easily because the Spirit was so strong."
It was a spiritual experience for the Udy family as well, he said. "This experience and the (spirit of doing work for our kindred dead) has brought us closer together."
Other families in the stake feel the same. "Our testimony meetings are filled with family history stories, and the Spirit that has come from that since this project has started," he said.
The stake youth project began with a challenge by stake President Crittenden for youth to gather 3,000 family names, which was a monumental exercise, said President Michael D. Farr, first counselor in the stake presidency.
While there were all-day Saturdays, pizza parties and dinners, competitions and computers mixed in, it was a primarily spiritual project, he said. The youth came together with a fast and then a fireside. It was then when leaders saw the first stirrings of something out of the ordinary.
'We put 10 rows of chairs in the hall," said Brother Udy. But before the meeting began, the building was filled to capacity with youth and parents — some 750 people.
The early weeks of the project saw slow starts and administrative kinks. There were serious challenges. High priests were enlisted to help. Schedules for each ward attending the library and the temple were worked out. Adults, including those in a young singles ward, pitched in to help.
"It was highly structured," said Brother Udy. "It had to be or it would have failed."
The committee carefully organized and scheduled the project, which included ward leaders going to the library and learning how to assist youth to search for their ancestors, then bringing in the youth. With the guidance of the family history center, the committee put together a tutorial CD-rom, "Saviors on Mount Zion" and manual with which they taught youth and parents.
"It was neat and exciting for them and us," said Emil O. Hansen, director of the Ogden Family History Center, located on Ogden's 24th Street. He said other stakes have had similar programs in the past, but nothing as large as this one.
"After a couple of weeks of training they brought their kids in and instead of us helping them, they helped them. The kids seemed to really enjoy it."
With South Weber wards at the center three and four nights a week, one night some 270 people came, which was "more than we can handle."
As the names began accumulating, ward leaders started calling it "the miracle on 24th Street."
But the names came slowly. By September — half the original time allotted — fewer than 400 names were gathered. The leaders dug in and obtained more support from ward leaders. They taught the youth to avoid duplicates of names and used software to more readily collect the names and dates.
Parents cleared names through TempleReady, and the committee took names to the temple and received and organized name cards. By the end of October, nearly 3,000 names had been submitted. By the time Jan. 14 arrived, the number of names had reached more than 10,000.
Youth who submitted names, and others who did not, participated in the temple work. One youth who searched the Internet, books and contacted relatives was Tristan Thomas.
"You get to know these people better when you do their work," he said.
Melodee Young, 13, of the Cedar Bench Ward, thought research would be hard, but "it was easier than I thought."
After looking up family names on the Internet — people with lots of "greats" who lived 250 years ago — she was baptized for them by her father. Her mother, brother and grandmother were also present. "It was really spiritual," she said.
"We're going to keep looking up names and getting baptized for them."
E-mail to: jhart@desnews.com
