A Family History Mission: Mission Calls Go Digital

https://www.lds.org/church/news/from-snail-mail-to-email-mission-calls-are-going-digital?lang=eng

No. 79

Note: You can do a Google search for "A Family History Mission James Tanner" to see all the previous posts in this ongoing series. You can also search for "James Tanner genealogy" and find them or click back through all the posts.

You can imagine that the full-time missionaries had a lot to discuss concerning the news that eventually all mission calls in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will be made by email. When we received our full-time mission call, we had quite of few of the family members present electronically since our family is all over the country. I don't see changing the paper notice to an electronic one as much of a change. We have had nothing but trouble getting our paper-based mail here in Annapolis.

I mentioned that when we arrived, we had been told the wrong apartment number and had given that wrong number to the U.S. Postal Service. Well, here we are more than nine months into our mission and now we are still getting regular mail delivered to the wrong apartment. Apparently, the post office sold the mailing list off and we are getting both junk mail and some mail from companies that we thought had the right mailing address. We have changed almost all of our bills to direct deposit, so the damage from getting mail sent to the wrong address has been minimized except that there have been some notable exceptions where the wrong address caused us some losses.

We have visited the post office here locally and submitted at least four or five written corrections but nothing seems to make a difference.

One of the first comments about the change in the method of mission calls from the missionaries was that the change would save a lot of money. In additions, since the young missionaries are sometimes away from home, sending them an email that can be printed lets them "open" their own document. Since I do almost everything having to do with writing online now, I think it is a good idea.

It is a challenge not to be repetitious about working in the Maryland State Archives. Our big discussion right now has to do with reallocating the responsibility for the document preparation area. At least two of the missionaries need to be there to supervise the volunteers, organize the documents for preparation and take care of answering questions about the documents. We will still have five couple serving through the end of November. One of our five couples is leaving at the end of September but another couple will arrive shortly after they leave. We leave to return to Provo at the end of November at the same time as one other couple. But so far, we have only heard of one couple coming as a replacement.

All of this may sound like fussing, but it is quite complicated to maintain a steady flow of documents for the four cameras. The work of preparing the documents and then operating the cameras to digitize the documents takes a lot of concentration and hard work and we meet every week as a group to discuss what needs to happen that week. We also all have family and health issues to discuss and time passes quickly.

We are wondering when the weather starts to cool off here in Annapolis. We are still getting days that are hot and humid. We are going to be interested to see what they do with the leaves from all the trees. We are getting into a steady routine and I am sure will be surprised at how quickly time will have past by.