Church History Library (the new one)

So I finally went to the Church History Library. You know, the brand new building north of temple square with all the publicity and the fancy carpets? Nice place? Friendly staff? Yeah, that place.

My wife dropped me of one morning during our visit to Salt Lake City and I immediately started for the card catalogue. Rumor has it that it isn't universally loved. I figured why not get the hard stuff over right away. I started off with some easy searches. Honestly, it isn't hard to use, it just returns too much. For example, I wanted the journals of Edward Stevenson Jr. because he served in Lewis County Tennessee in 1878. I found lots of stuff and couldn't figure out which one was the reference I needed. I wrote down three that I thought might be what I wanted and headed for the reference desk.

After a brief wait I spoke with someone about my search. He took one look at the form I filled out for the first reference and got a real puzzled look on his face. "Where did you find this?" he asked. "In your card catalogue. Is it not here?" I responded. "Well, it is here. But it is in the employee only section. It isn't something you can look at." So I tell him what I want and we start looking from scratch. We eventually find it. But not with the help of the card catalogue.

I had other documents to look at and we found those too. I went back to the reading room and found my first microfilm was already waiting for me. I took it back to the computer microfilm reader and figured out how to load it. I had never used on before. And I probably won't use again until I have to. Every time I advanced a screen it took a couple of seconds to render the image. I was accustomed to skimming through a microfilm to find the exact spot I wanted. I would normally stop on a page only long enough to determine if I had gone far enough. waiting for the page to render easily doubled the amount of time it took for me to skim through a film. After 10 minutes I gave up and moved to another, older machine and started over.

Ten minutes later I had found what I wanted and started reading. I ended up going through several microfilms and one paper document. With the exception of the Edward Stevenson Jr. journal, I was not allowed to copy any of it. The journals of George Henry Carver and Martin Garn are only available to members of the family (any family members out there willing to help me out with these?). I totally understand that. The "Donations to the Tennessee Martyrs Fund" was completely restricted. But I might submit a request in the future anyway. And the manuscript by Georgiana Roberts Livingston Mowry we won't talk about.

Overall the visit was productive and fun and wonderful. The staff was great to work with and the people a pleasure to meet.