Genealogy is very important to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. We each researched out our family history and then performed sacred ordinances for our ancestors who had died before they had a chance to do them themselves. To help accomplish this, the Church had a large genealogy library. In the 1970s, this was located in the first four floors of the west wing of the new Church Office Building in downtown Salt Lake City. Mom took me there for my first visit when I was twelve or thirteen. Partly because I was working on the genealogy merit badge and partly because she wanted me to experience it and maybe get into doing genealogical research myself.
It was a Saturday morning. We parked near Dad’s office which was a block away from the Church Office Building. We entered the library from the ground floor. The first thing we did was take a tour. Mom got some ear phones and a tape player from the information desk. I put the earphones on and the narrator’s voice directed me where to go in the library and explained each section’s purpose to me. There was a card catalog, bigger than I had ever seen before. It showed what the library had in the way of books on family histories and references, as well as maps. I moved on to see many of the books. I loved seeing them all on the shelves. I had thought the library was big for my Junior High School. But this was much larger. And the books looked a lot older, as well. I loved the smell of them. We went up another floor and saw rows and rows of shelves. These contained nothing but legal sized binders with pedigree charts and family group sheets. We turned off the tape and Mom found and showed me a binder with some of our family’s information. I was amazed. A few sheets in a vast ocean of people’s names, dates, and other important information.
We went to another floor and saw row upon row of hooded machines with people sitting at them. The lights on that floor were darkened. People were threading film though spindles and then a light in the top of each machine projected the film’s contents onto the bottom of the machine. Even though I had never seen one before, it didn’t take me long to recognize these as microfilm readers. We moved on and found some smaller machines. These had little cards made of film which the machine read. Mom explained to me that these were called micro-fiche. At this point we realized that the tape wasn’t running, so I turned it back on and it explained the microfilm and micro-fiche to me, almost word for word of what Mom had just told me.
We went back to the floor where the shelves full of binders was. This was also where the copy center was located. People were standing in line, waiting for a person to help them make some copies. Some people had the big legal sized binders. Others had the books. The person at the front of the line explained to the college-age person on the other side of the counter what copies were to be made. The copy machines were very special because they had the ability to copy onto plain paper. At that time, every copy machine I had seen, copied onto thermal fax paper. I was amazed at the whole thing. I loved this place! Over the years I would visit it many times more, with Mom, and with Dad, and by myself.
No comments:
Post a Comment