Interest in history leads to building the kingdom
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Not long after he joined the Church in 1969, Larry Faria became a collector of items relating to Church history. It was an interest that started small but developed into a passion and talent that he now uses to benefit the Church and kingdom of God in his own unique way.
Brother Faria, a retired owner of a fast-food business, and his wife, Sandi, are members of the Monett Ward, Joplin Missouri Stake. These days, when they are not occupied as ordinance workers at the Oklahoma City Oklahoma Temple, they spend their spare time combing Internet auction sites for rare documents pertaining to Mormonism and hosting collectors at their home, making trades for anything they think might interest officials in the Church History Department.
On a recent visit to Salt Lake City, Brother Faria spent two days with the acquisitions team at the Church History Library, explaining the ins, outs and potential pitfalls of Internet dealing.
"Inescapably, a growing part of acquisitions is not face-to-face," explained Brad Westwood, manager of acquisitions for the Church History Department. "It's the Web, it's eBay, it's all these other means of selling and trading materials."
With the advent of the Worldwide Web, the paradigm has changed altogether, Brother Westwood said. "The players are different, the knowledge of what's out there is different. Also, the perils are different, not only intentional but unintentional. One of the things Larry shared with us is how to do your deep research."
He showed them a document apparently pertaining to Joseph Smith. The time and place were consistent with the Prophet's lifetime. It turned out to pertain to a different Joseph Smith than the Prophet, however, because research showed the Prophet wasn't there in that county at that particular time. "Yet most specialists that Larry spoke to immediately assumed it was our Joseph Smith," Brother Westwood said.
Such knowledge came to Brother and Sister Faria through experience. The Internet was unheard of when he began collecting in the late 1970s, haunting antique shops and second-hand book dealerships. With the advent of the Web, they entered the world of online bidding, acquiring skills and certain instincts.
"Literally, I've been on a campaign to help the Church acquire rare, unique, bulls-eye documents," he said. "I've been trading a lot of my stuff with other collectors and dealers to get bulls-eyes and pass them on to the Church."
That endeavor began several years ago, on one of the Farias' annual visits to BYU Education Week. There, he spoke in a casual conversation with LeGrand L. Baker, then professor of manuscript collections at the university's Harold B. Lee Library. He mentioned that he had deeds, letters and papers from Mormon-era Hancock County, Ill., 1839-46.
"He didn't believe me," Brother Faria recalled. "He said they'd been looking for that stuff for two years."
Brother Faria immediately went and retrieved the material from the trunk of his car to show the curator. The amazed Brother Baker later wrote, expressing gratitude to the Farias for making the documents available and saying they would constitute an important part of the Joseph Smith Papers Project then under way. He had shown the materials to special collections curator David Whitaker, who described the Farias' find as "something of a miracle."
"They were telling me I was a tool in the Lord's hands to bring forth this work," Brother Faria recalled. He discounted his good fortune as coincidence. But he began to reflect on his experiences. By a similar chain of circumstances, he had come into possession of a collection of some 900 documents from the "cradle of Mormonism" in New York. These he also made available to the Church, as he did another collection from the Kirtland, Ohio, area.
"All these documents started coming out of the woodwork like crazy," he said. "I kept hearing these words, 'You are a tool in the Lord's hands.' It took me a while to realize it.
"Then, when I started finding real rarities on the Internet, it got so uncanny that it's hard to even explain."
He would pray before making an Internet bid. Repeatedly, he would get the impression that his bid was not going to be successful, and at the last minute he would place another bid, just $1 over the highest existing bid, barely enough to make his the succeeding bid.
"I started to realize it was not me doing this," he said. "I'm not that smart to figure out a price that close" to an item's market value.
It was something of an epiphany for Brother Faria when John Murphy, a curator at BYU, asked him what would become of his documents after he dies. He pondered the mindset of a typical collector. "You think of them as stocks and bonds, as dollar signs."
He could not let that happen to items he had collected that he regarded as vital components of the Church's history.
Commending Brother Faria, Brother Westwood said, "You've become something of a supporter of ours by saying in effect, 'These things should not end up being dissipated or sold or stored in someone's little safe in their home. These are things that the Church and all of its members can benefit from.' "
Brother Faria said a collector can feel possessive, thinking he holds a piece of the Church in his hands that no one else has. "That's the attitude I started developing," he said, "until the Spirit woke me up and said, 'This is not your stuff; you're not going to take it with you.'"
