Mission Make-up

By the title you might think we are talking about lipstick, eyeliner, mascara and foundation. Nope, I am going to explain a little bit about the elements of the mission.

The official name of our mission is The Family and Church History Headquarters Mission. There are approximately 1200 missionaries in the mission. A proselyting mission has approximately 200! There are about 400 full time missionaries and 800 church service missionaries (CSM). The full time missionaries are senior couples and single senior sisters who serve 12, 18, 23 months. Almost all are from outside the Salt Lake City area and move to Salt Lake and donate their time exclusively to the mission and pay their own expenses. There are, however, 70 young male missionaries. I talked a little about them in an earlier post. They have a medical condition that prevents them from serving a full time proselyting mission (those are the young Elders you see on bikes riding or walking around your city). The CSMs live in their own home within about 100 miles or less and volunteer approximately 20 hours a week. They serve in all areas of the mission here in Salt Lake. Some of them have been serving for many, many years. In many ways, they are the backbone of the mission because they don't leave after 12, 18 or 23 months but stay for many years and bring stability into an environment that is ever changing.

The mission provides missionaries who work in cooperation with the full-time professional staff in the Family History Library (FHL), the Joseph Smith Memorial Building (JSMB), the Church Office Building (COB), the Church History Library (CHL) and the Church History Museum (CHM). The Family History Library, the Church History Museum and the Church History Library create kind of a triangle of confusion. Their names are similar but their collections are quite separate and unique from each other. I might do a later post about each one because they are all incredible places to work and visit.

Here is a list and tiny description of the zones or areas within each building listed above:

Family History Library:

International Services--ALL non-English countries. On the basement 1 level (B1).
British Services--British Isles, Australia, New Zealand and any other English speaking country other than the United States and Canada. On the basement 2 level (B2).
US/Canada--self explanatory. On the main floor, 2nd & 3rd floors.
Access Services--these are the REAL librarians. They help the patrons with digital and paper copies, clean the film readers, shelf the books, keep film and microfiche in their drawers, make change, etc. They are on every floor of the library.
Patron & Product Services--they are the greeters, they host groups and they teach new FHL missionaries in their library classes.
Deaf Services--they have a special booth with the video phone for helping hearing impaired patrons who are not at the library but call in for help. They also help any deaf patrons who visit the FHL. There are not many missionaries in their zone but they have been serving for MANY years.
Digital Preservation--this group is digitizing all the family history books that are in the FHL and putting them up on this website, so they are available as every word searchable to anyone with Internet connection!!

Church History Museum:

 

Most, if not all of the museum docents are missionaries. I am not sure if there are full time missionaries there or not. I know that most of them are CSMs. When we were here on our last mission, there were full time missionaries assigned but I do not see it in the zone list.

 Church History Library:

Church History Collections--these missionaries help with digitizing and making available all of the different resources for patrons. The library is only 3 years old and before it was opened most of what is now available to the public was in storage. Making this information accessible is a huge project now that there is a place for it to be used. 

Church History Library Services--these missionaries are the greeters at the front desk of the CHL and serve as guides for public tours. 

Church History Special Projects--these missionaries work on special projects, things like the Joseph Smith Papers!

Joseph Smith Memorial Building:

FamilySearch Services--right through this door is the Family Search Center. It is an appendage of the FHL. A place where tourists on Temple Square can get a quick taste of researching their family.
Technical Support--missionaries help those who call, email and instant message problems they are having with equipment in LDS Church buildings or LDS created software.
World Wide Support--this is the zone where Len and I work. There are several groups in the zone. The goal of this zone is to answer questions from anyone with a question about family history and familysearch.org. These questions come as emails, phone calls and chats. Len answers questions about new.familysearch and the new Family Tree. I mostly train new family history center directors one-on-one over the phone.
Data Quality--these missionaries make sure that the information found online through familysearch.org is accurate and if not, they try and make the corrections, when possible.

Church Headquarters:

There are 3 zones because there are sooo many different areas where missionaries are needed. None of these are related to family history. A few we are aware of from missionaries we have known who serve in Church Headquarters. There are those who work in the real estate area, natural resources area, temple construction, medical fields, translation department, missionary department, public relations, you name it and there is an office for it and a need for a missionary to help!

The young sister missionaries who serve as guides on Temple Square are in a totally separate mission. So are the senior couples who are guides on Temple Square and at the Conference Center. Before we came on our first mission we had no idea how many people are needed to fill the positions and how organized it all is.

Records of hours worked by missionaries were kept last year (2011) and they estimate that if each missionary was paid $10 an hour that the savings to the Church in just salaries alone was over $10.5 million!!!! Pretty amazing.