I appreciate the mention of my English-Australian heritage, if only for one reason. Some of you will very quickly notice that I have an accent. I often find I’ve been talking to people for several minutes and I have the distinct feeling they aren’t really listening to me. Then they suddenly ask, “Where are you from?” And I realize that nothing I’ve said for the past few minutes has sunk in. So I’m glad that’s out of the way and you can listen without distraction!
I was amused some years ago when a young student from Utah asked me incredulously, “Do we have an accent?” So, for those who may think as she did, understand that the language I’m speaking now is an ancient one known as E-n-g-l-i-s-h. Unfamiliar as that may be to you, do please try to keep up. If you have questions for me later, I do understand Idahoan - as long as you speak slowly and use hand gestures.
I don’t know how often devotional speakers in the past have addressed the topic that I’ve chosen today. I’m not going to talk about Church public affairs even though that’s my professional work. My topic may be an unusual one for this young audience and I know I’m taking something of a risk in choosing it. Certainly when I tell you that family history is my topic, many of you may think it’s a better subject for old people, and the rest of you will want to go to sleep. But I hope by the time I’ve finished you’ll understand why it’s important. You are the tech-savvy generation. You bring to the table certain qualifications, aptitudes and experiences which are familiar to your generation. And we’ll see in a few minutes why that’s invaluable.
I want to start today by reading to you an entire section of the Doctrine and Covenants. Fortunately, it’s the shortest section in the whole book and consists of just three verses. It’s also in my view one of the most remarkable passages in allscripture.
“Behold, I will reveal unto you the Priesthood, by the hand of Elijah the Prophet, before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord.
And he shall plant in the hearts of the children the promises made to the fathers, and the hearts of the children shall turn to their fathers.
If it were not so, the whole earth would be utterly wasted at his coming.”[1]
There is a great deal that is remarkable about this passage, but to me one of the most amazing things isn’t in the text at all. It’s in the date. September 21, 1823.
Different religious groups might interpret this passage differently, but when we read this passage we know immediately that has something to do with family history and temple work and the sealing power of the priesthood. But no one knew anything about genealogy or temples in 1823 when this message was delivered by Moroni to Joseph. Joseph himself could not possibly have understood its significance. He was 17 years old. It was to be seven years before the Church was even organized, and 13 years before Elijah would appear in the Kirtland temple to fulfill this prophecy.
Nearly 20 years later when Joseph was preaching at the funeral of Brother King Follett, he had come to understand its huge significance. But not in 1823 when he would have made little sense out of it.
So why would the Lord after centuries of darkness and the absence of prophets make this one of the first scriptures of the new dispensation of the Fullness of Times? What was so hugely important that the Lord would make sure this message was recorded and written down before dealing with anything else, including the organization of the Church and all of the other revelations that followed?
Equally significant, perhaps, is that these words – or some very like them – were also the closing words of the Old Testament. So the closing words of the Old Testament and some of the opening words of the Dispensation of the Fullness of Times address the same topic! Perhaps Moroni gave a clue to its importance when he said that if the hearts of the children don’t turn to their fathers, the whole earth would be wasted at the Lord’s coming. Why wasted?
I think some of the answer is found in the question: how many people have ever lived in the entire history of the world?
If you type that question into a Google search engine you’ll find a surprising number of scholarly articles on the subject. The Population Reference Bureau puts the figure at 106 billion. Others are much higher or lower, and of course they are all guesses based on the absence of critical data and many variables. But let’s take one of the lowest estimates – around 60 billion.
Let me help you visualize this. The entire circle represents everyone who has ever lived. The dark blue segment is proportionately how many people live on the earth today. And that thin line you see represents the 12 million Latter-day Saints in the world. In fact, I’ve exaggerated that line because if I were to draw it proportionately it would be so thin you wouldn’t even see it.
Now look at the orange segment of roughly 60 billion and consider how few of the billions of people represented there ever heard the gospel in its fullness.
We read in the New Testament that as Christ’s body lay in the tomb his Spirit went to the spirit world where he opened the preaching of the gospel to the dead. In 1 Peter 4:6 we learn in clear language why he did that.
“For this cause was the gospel preached also to them that are dead, that they might be judged according to men in the flesh, but live according to God in the spirit.”[2]
It’s been 2,000 years since the Savior initiated that work of preaching to the dead in the spirit world. How many would have responded to his message, do you think? Millions? Billions? But the ordinance work has to be done here on earth.
Now consider how much family history and temple work has to be done by the tiny fraction of Latter-day Saints who qualify by reason of age, worthiness and reasonable proximity to a temple to undertake this work for the dead. Even if we assume all 12 million Latter-day Saints were engaged in family history and temple work (which is, of course, impossible), the pie chart can only represent that number as a very thin line, too small even to make a wedge.
And, you know what? It’s too easy to talk about numbers in the abstract. The sheer number of spirits waiting for temple ordinances is so overwhelming that we may find it difficult to appreciate that every spirit is one of our Father’s children. These spirits we are talking about are not just forgotten names. These people lived and loved and died, and struggled with the challenges of life, just like we do except usually in very much harder circumstances. So let me help you visualize it a little.
As you look at these faces, ask yourself who these people were, whose wife or child. What struggles have they had? What triumphs?
Can we use our imagination sufficiently to leave our own world to place ourselves in theirs? This picture of a Taiwanese woman was taken when her nation was under foreign occupation. What was life like for her?
Or for these young boys from India. If our Heavenly Father notices the fall of a sparrow, it’s certain that he knows who these boys are. Have they embraced the gospel in the spirit world?
Look into the eyes of this Native American woman, photographed by Edward Curtis in 1911, one of a fabulous collection in the library of the Northwestern University. What incredible changes and trials did she see in her life and for her people?
The children in these photographs were being raised about the same time – the young girl in relative comfort in Europe, the baby, in Lapland, both in the early 1900s.
Or these two children, one playing in the street of an English industrial town, the other, a child of a Bedouin woman. National Geographic, writing of this picture on the right in 1917, said this:
“The father of this little nomad may be a warlike bandit with a cloudy notion of property rights and other details of the civilized code; his mother a simple daughter of the desert with a childish curiosity and fondness for gaudy trinkets, but her babe has the divine heritage of mother love as truly as the most fortunate child of our own land.”
How interesting that National Geographic would use the phrase “divine heritage” to describe “mother love.”
Being loved by God is exactly what all of the human family has in common, whether gypsies from Western Greece or a tribeswoman from the Kalahari Desert, whether they lived a thousand years ago or whether they live today.
For me, Latter-day Saint doctrine on this topic is one of the most glorious concepts revealed during this dispensation. For some of our fellow-Christians, the photographs of people that I’ve shown you represent people who are lost. They didn’t accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior in this life, and that’s all there is to it. It doesn’t matter that they lived in a part of the world where the name Jesus might never be heard.
I want to ask you in all seriousness, what kind of a God would it be who would institute a set of conditions for his children to meet – faith, repentance, baptism and so forth – and then automatically exclude the vast majority of his children from ever meeting those conditions. What about the Buddhists or the Hindus, or the people who lived under atheistic communism? What about the countless millions who have lived in Christian nations but whose faith has been nominal at best, through an impartial understanding of the gospel and an absence of anyone to teach them or lead by example?
In The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the term we most commonly use for God is “Heavenly Father.” That is no casual term. God is a loving Father who cares about every one of his children and who will not leave them to chance. Since he has given them moral agency, there must also be a way for them ultimately to exercise the great choices that will help determine their destiny.
Now, we know that temple work will be among the great works of the Millennium when much of this work will be done. But it has started now! My purpose today is to help you understand something of the role that you can play in the Lord’s plan. It may not be the same role that your parents are playing. It doesn’t have to be demanding in time or energy. But it will turn your hearts to your fathers in ways you can scarcely imagine. Not to the Bedouin or the Taiwanese, probably, but to your own people certainly.
I’d like you just for a moment to try to see things from the Lord’s perspective. Imagine that you are seeing things from the Lord’s point of view, and that you are contemplating the billions of spirits who have to hear the gospel and receive ordinances if the whole earth is not to be wasted. I would think you would want to do the following:
- First, I would think you’d make the importance of work for the dead abundantly clear in scripture, in the Old Testament as well as the New, and perhaps putting the message at the close of the Old Testament so the words can ring through the centuries.
- I would think that you might, at the beginning of the final dispensation, send a resurrected prophet to impress upon the bright and receptive mind of the young Prophet of the Restoration something so important that it would stay with him throughout his ministry and not be lost.
- I would think you would send Elijah, as soon as the Kirtland temple was completed in 1836, so he could fulfill that ancient prophecy to turn the key and usher in the great work of redeeming the dead through sealing ordinances.
- I think you might choose to inspire governments to begin to keep census and civil records – for example, the beginning of civil registration in England in 1837 - the precise year that missionaries of the Restoration first set foot in that land.
- I think if you were in the Lord’s position you might choose to inspire early Church leaders to encourage the gathering of records to help make this work possible, even as early as 1894 when the Genealogical Society of Utah was established.
- I would think you would be anxious to put into the hands of your children the technical means for a quantum leap in research to discover available names, through microfilm and later digital technology and the Internet.
- I would think you would prompt Church leaders to invest substantially in the technology and the infrastructure to aid the Saints in this work and move it forward at speeds inconceivable a few years ago.
- I think you might inspire a modern prophet to build temples at a rate inconceivable to earlier generations.
- And, I think maybe you would stand ready and willing to respond to every heartfelt prayer for help from a worthy member of the Church who understands something about praying with “real intent, having faith in Christ.”
Maybe that’s what you might do, if you were concerned about the whole earth being utterly wasted at his coming.
Now, this is a devotional and not a genealogy class, so I’m not going to talk to you about how to do research. Every ward has people who are called to advise you about that.
What I do want to do this afternoon is suggest some things that will help turn your hearts to your fathers. Acknowledging that there is a time and a season for every purpose, I want, nevertheless, to start you thinking about family history as a lifelong pursuit so it’s never far from your minds. And I want to help enrich your temple experiences and prepare you to make the temple a lifetime focus.
Now, why would I choose this message for this audience?
I doubt whether there’s a person in this entire audience who isn’t very familiar with how to use a computer. The same isn’t true for your parents, so I want you to do something next time you’re in their home. I want to give you three quick housekeeping tasks that need to be done before we can move onto the exciting stuff.
So, if your parents have a computer at home with an Internet connection but don’t have a genealogy program on their hard drive, go to familysearch.org and download a free copy of Personal Ancestral File for them. It will take you a few minutes to set that up and you’ve removed obstacle number 1.
Obstacle number 2 is the myth that says, “My family history is all done.” There are also variations of this, such as “Uncle Fred is the family historian and he does it all”. That’s a bit like saying “Well I don’t go to Church, but that’s OK because Uncle Fred goes for me.” The fact is that for our hearts to be turned to our fathers, to forge that welding link that seems so important to the Lord, we need to be personally engaged in this work.
And it hasn’t all been done, Brothers and Sisters – I guarantee it. We each have two parents and four grandparents, and they double each generation. In 10 generations you have 512 of them – not counting the thousands of other family members they bore. My longest line is 16 generations. If I had every 16th great grandparent and every direct ancestor between me and them I would have nearly 33,000 direct ancestors. A month or so ago I received an email from someone working on his 31st generation. He would have more than 1 billion, seventy three million direct forebears if he had them all. It isn’t all done.
Third step. If your family has never done any family history work, sit down with them and get them to physically enter their own names into Personal Ancestral File, or whatever other program you have on your computer. Enter just husband, wife and children, no more for the moment – just their names, birth dates and places, marriage dates and places, etc. That might take you 20 minutes.
If they have their records only in written form, on pedigree charts or in a shoe box, get them to start entering the names and dates and places on the computer. Once information is transcribed, miracles can start to happen as it’s shared on the Internet, as we’ll see in a moment.
Now the next step is where you have to work a little. Get a digital recording device – a digital video camera is great if you have access to one, but audio is better than nothing – and start talking to your parents about their early lives, what they remember of their parents and grandparents. Do this in multiple sittings, but get it down while you still have the blessing of living parents. If you don’t have that blessing, then get to the aunts and uncles or anyone of previous generations. If you don’t do it, those memories will pass out of existence.
You may say that it’s easier said than done to get your parents to sit down at a keyboard or in front of a recording device and do this. I don’t buy that. My wife and I raised eight teenagers and I have never encountered anything with such formidable persuasive power as a teenager or young adult who wants something. Whether it’s “Dad, my life will be over if I can’t borrow the keys to the car,” or just talking me out of that last $20 in my wallet, I know from personal experience that you can do this. You are hard wired-that way. You are unstoppable when you have made up your mind.
Now with those preliminaries out of the way, I want to open up to you a world that you may never have experienced. It’s the world of your forebears.
I never knew my Dad. I knew he was a soldier in the British Army in World War II. I knew he had been a Prisoner of War for several years. But I didn’t know much else.
Two months ago I posted this on the Internet. I know you can’t read the screen so I’ll read it to you.
“Robert Otterson was buried in the summer of 1949. Rifle shots were fired over the grave and a Union Jack draped the coffin. Later, his older brother would say of the funeral wake that it was a particularly silent affair. The usual attempts to cheer up the mourners with stories and even a little humor were absent. Such was the stunned reaction to the death of a man who, at 37 and as a professional soldier, had spent more years away from home and family than he had ever wished. Three of those years had seen him incarcerated as a prisoner-of-war, first in North Africa, then in Italy and finally in Germany. As he walked up the narrow street of a village in Surrey, England, to be reunited with his family again in the late spring of 1945, he described his feelings as ‘on top of the world.’
Four years later he was dead. Not the glorious battlefield death of a soldier, but a common road accident that threw him from his motor bike on a Welsh country road. For me, his son, it meant growing up without a father. I was nine months old and have no memory of him. I felt no particular deprivation during my boyhood - due, no doubt, to a devoted mother and two caring older sisters. But as I grew older I began to sense the loss. I missed the experience of talking to a father. I missed the things I imagined he would have taught me. I missed his wisdom.
Yet that fact has been the stimulus for me to learn all I could about his life. Over the years I have recreated from interviews, letters and journals what I could not learn first-hand. I share it now for his children, his 10 grandchildren and 21 great grandchildren, with the hope that they will come to know and appreciate this remarkable man.”
And I’m still learning. I never knew whether there was any trace of the German prison camp where my father spent the last months of World War II. But this past summer my wife and I found the huge flat field in what used to be East Germany, near Muhlberg on the Elbe River. Using my Dad’s prison camp journal, we followed the route he took when he grew tired of the Russian military authorities who liberated the camp in March 1945 but who wouldn’t let the Allied soldiers leave. So he and a friend slipped out of the camp anyway, and tracked across fields and streams, headed for the American lines 40 kilometers to the west. Overnight they slept in a barn with German refugees to avoid the Russian patrols. Finally they reached the River Mulde. Over the other side of the bridge were the American front lines. My father describes his feelings as he walked over that bridge and shook hands with American soldiers on the other side. For the first time in years, he said, he felt “really free.”
So, of course, you know what I did this past summer. I walked across that bridge over the Mulde River as my father had done, and I shook hands with the only home-grown American in our company – my son-in-law. I then stood on the bank of the river with the bridge in the background, and read from my father’s journal as my daughter recorded it. That will now be posted on our website at otterson.us in the hope that it will help turn the hearts of my children and grandchildren to their fathers.
What if I hadn’t been able to travel to Germany? That is the wonderful thing about the power of the Internet. As I mention some of these discoveries, I hope you are thinking about the parallels in your own families and what you should search for, and what you can find.
From the Reiksmuseum in the Netherlands I found a picture of the gates to the camp known as Stalag IVB, as it had stood on that field you saw earlier.
From an Italian naval site I found a picture of the prison ship that carried my father from North Africa to Italy, across the Mediterranean for three miserable days. Many of the men had dysentery. There was no proper sanitation. They slept below decks on metal floors, wretched, hungry souls who didn’t know if they would survive. My father describes his place on the ship, below the aft hatch. Then I found this on the Internet, on a site for model ship building. It is the very ship, the Ugo Foscolo, that carried those British prisoners of war across the Mediterranean. You can clearly see the hatch he describes.
When they finally disembarked, they faced a 5-kilometer march – an eternity it seemed to some of them – to their new camp near Bari on the Adriatic coast. As they shuffled through the village, my father depicts it this way:
“As we passed through the city, the doors and windows of every house were filled with curious spectators. There were giggling girls, mocking youths, grave-faced men and an old lady who watched while tears ran down her furrowed cheeks. Truly, our appearance was more to be pitied than laughed at, but ragged, unkempt, dirty and half-starved as we were, we unconsciously held our heads erect, got into step and gazed defiantly back at the mocking faces, while the war songs of 25 years ago burst from our lips and echoed through the street.”
So why is this important? Because when I stand in the baptismal font of a temple – as I did in London in 1976 for my father – or complete any temple work for someone whose life I’ve studied, the experience is immeasurably richer. And even if all I can find on the Internet is a description of the time and place in which an ancestor lived – and that is the case for most of them - it still enables me to make a connection. Family history for me now is not just names and dates, but flesh and blood, experiences to be passed on, stories to bind and strengthen families. Could the Lord also have had this in mind when he said that the hearts of the children would be turned to their fathers?
You are a blessed generation. Many of you are the beneficiaries of journals and stories of your own that have been passed down. Please don’t be casual about them. Treasure them and learn more, and make sure they are recorded and shared – on the Internet if possible. You are not frightened or hesitant about the technology that is now making possible the most stunning advances in connecting families and resurrecting the stories of their lives.
Some of you may have seen the movie, “Where Jesus Walked.” A few of you have even been to Israel. Perhaps you’ve sat on the slopes overlooking Galilee, or walked the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem where tradition says Christ carried his cross to Golgotha. Or maybe you’ve stood in Gethsemane. Such experiences, while not essential to spirituality, have a catalyzing effect for many. It’s hard to read the scriptural accounts of those events afterwards and not feel a connection. Our hearts and minds are drawn to the experience and we become stronger as a result.
Now let me share a few quick experiences that show how doors will be opened if we do our part.
Everything I’m going to show you has been written and discovered in the last several weeks.
Recently I received an email from a complete stranger about someone on my wife’s line. When you post your family history on the Internet – and that’s one of the first things you need to do - you can get a lot of email if you do it right. The writer was responding to one of many postings I had placed on the Internet. His email said basically, is your Henry Wright born in 1782 the same person as my Henry Wright also born in 1782. Such exploratory emails are very common in the genealogical world.
When we affirmed the right dates, places and other names, he proceeded to deliver 1,100 names back to the 1500s, well researched, with documented sources. That led to much more, including old photographs and missing information to fill in stories. It even led to my wife rediscovering the best friend of her youth – a second cousin with whom we had lost contact 20 years ago.
My wife, Cathy, whose interest in actually doing family history, to put it diplomatically, has been… intermittent… over the years, mentioned to me after receiving this flood of names that she had been praying for help in finding her ancestors. I looked at her in surprise because she hadn’t mentioned it. ‘How long have you been praying about it?” I asked. “About three weeks,” she said. “But I prayed really sincerely.” I’m not sure what that says about my prayers for 40 years, but it does show that help may be closer than you think.
As a direct result of that one email, we added four pages to our family history website.
Notice the picture at the top left. I know you can’t see it very well but it’s concepts I want to share, not detail. I was adding to the research one evening at the computer and my wife was dozing in an armchair. “Guess what,” I said. “You have hobbits in your family tree.” We had found that the area where her newly found 3rd great grandfather was born was the very same picturesque area that inspired Tolkien to describe the Shire in Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit. OK, it’s a stretch, but when you can’t claim royalty, hobbits will do.
As we continued to research this family line on the Internet, the emotional connections became stronger as we got into the lives of relative after relative. The 2nd great grandfather who, as part of an occupying British army in Ireland, married an Irish Catholic girl and brought her back to England – not an easy thing to do in those days. The second wife who died in childbirth in the store room of a military barracks in Liverpool.
It is truly astonishing what can now be found online, from the comfort of your own home. The methodology is not a subject for a devotional, but there are plenty of sources out there to show you how. The motivation, however, is another thing. And that’s what we’re talking about today – that inner drive that will make you connect emotionally and even spiritually with your forebears in a way that is transformational.
Let me illustrate with one last story. In the summer of 1842, the British Government produced a report on the appalling conditions for the children of very young ages who were working in the English coal mines of the Industrial Revolution. The report is an extremely weighty one, running to hundreds of pages. It includes interviews with many of the children who suffered unbelievable conditions as they worked in almost total darkness to help eke out a living for their families.
I want to read you an extract in the report, the testimony of one boy who began working in the mines at the age of 8. This is what he said in 1841 when he was questioned about his work. The language is in places obsolete and the occupational terms unfamiliar, but you’ll get the gist of it.
“I became a door keeper on the barrow-way four years ago. I got up at four o’clock, took breakfast, walked to the pit by half past four; began work at five. I had no candles allowed at all, except my father gave me any; he gave me four, which burnt about five hours, and I sat in darkness the rest of the time….I used to sleep; I could not keep my eyes open. The overman used to bray us with the yard wand; he used to leave the marks; I used to be afraid. The putters sometimes thumped me for being asleep….We loose at five and come home. I got my dinner, washed; I took off all my clothes, and then went to bed about eight. I did not go out to play; the more we play, the more we sleep in the pit.”
That testimony was given by 12-year-old John Otterson. The father he refers to and who gave him four candles each day, was my 3rd great grandfather, Nicholas Otterson. Not surprisingly, that 12 year old boy didn’t want the life of a miner. Instead, he joined the Royal Navy where he served on a man of war – not in itself an easy life either, by the way. His wife died young, but he remarried and moved to the great English naval port of Portsmouth. He was 81 when he died - from a fall down the stairs of his home. And everything I have just told you came from the Internet.
Now, Brothers and Sisters. There’s nothing unique in this. Thousands of people have awoken to the realities of how our electronic age can transform our knowledge of our forebears and help us discover what was previously almost impossible to find. Most of your parents either can’t do this because they don’t know, or they need encouragement. This is your world – the world of Windows Explorer and Firefox, of iPods and iMacs, of digital files, of multiple audio and video formats. I don’t believe the Lord intended these inventions just for entertainment or email or chat with friends.
One of the things I love about the gospel of Jesus Christ is that we all matter. People living here and now and people who have gone before. The gospel is individual. Faith, repentance, how we live our lives, how we choose to respond to the priceless gift of the Atonement. Each person is as different as you and me. What will you do to help discover who they are, to preserve their memories and to help bring them the saving temple ordinances? The agricultural laborer, the sailor on a man-of-war or frigate, the cobbler and the needle maker and the dressmaker, the pioneer and those who long preceded them - all children of God.
Joseph F. Smith was President of the Church in October 1918 when he had the remarkable vision now recorded as Section 138 in the Doctrine and Covenants. Part of that section reads thus, speaking of the preaching of the gospel to the dead:
30 “But behold, from among the righteous, he (Jesus Christ) organized his forces and appointed messengers, clothed with power and authority, and commissioned them to go forth and carry the light of the gospel to them that were in darkness, even to all the spirits of men; and thus was the gospel preached to the dead.
31 And the chosen messengers went forth to declare the acceptable day of the Lord and proclaim liberty to the captives who were bound, even unto all who would repent of their sins and receive the gospel.
32 Thus was the gospel preached to those who had died in their sins, without a knowledge of the truth, or in transgression, having rejected the prophets.
33 These were taught faith in God, repentance from sin, vicarious baptism for the remission of sins, the gift of the Holy Ghost by the laying on of hands,
34 And all other principles of the gospel that were necessary for them to know in order to qualify themselves that they might be judged according to men in the flesh, but live according to God in the spirit.”
May your hearts truly turn to those whose sacrifices have helped you become who you are. May you feel the reality of the Spirit of Elijah. May you use your natural gifts and talents and experience to help capture the stories that make your families special, and that will help bind your children and your children’s children through those common experiences. In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.
Notes
[1] D&C 2
[2] 1 Peter 4:6