{"id":203,"date":"2008-11-14T02:50:06","date_gmt":"2008-11-14T02:50:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nltaylor.net\/sketchbook\/archives\/203"},"modified":"2008-11-14T14:29:09","modified_gmt":"2008-11-14T14:29:09","slug":"sleuthing-mormonism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nltaylor.net\/sketchbook\/archives\/203","title":{"rendered":"sleuthing & Mormonism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sooner or later a genealogy blog is going to reference Mormonism, however tangentially.<\/p>\n

My daughter’s third grade class has paired with a class in the Southwest; each pupil has a penpal in the other class. They have been trading letters filled with short, declarative sentences alternated with personal queries. <\/p>\n

My daughter\u2019s penpal:<\/p>\n

\u201c … Do you have any books? I have a Book of Mormon. …\u201d <\/p>\n

Only after my daughter had written her reply did she ask me about it. “What are Mormon books?”<\/p>\n

She thought she might have a Mormon book in her room somewhere. I was surprised, but not too surprised. There’s the recent Penguin biography of Joseph Smith somewhere in the study and I could have sworn there was a Book of Mormon<\/i> in our house at some point, but I haven’t seen it recently. (It is not on the shelf in the living room with my Vulgate, my Greek New Testament, or the ratty green vinyl Gideon KJV that my brother once snagged from a motel room in Wisconsin. Nor is it on the shelf in my bedroom with Tolkien.) <\/p>\n

I began to explain. <\/p>\n

I didn’t get very far. Turned out she was thinking of the Moomins<\/i>, the lovable hippo-trolls of Tove Jansson<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

She does have a book of those<\/i> in her room.<\/p>\n

But anyhow my daughter had already written her reply:<\/p>\n

\u201c… I don\u2019t have any Mormon books but I have a lot of Nancy Drew books. …\u201d<\/p>\n

Perhaps she’ll be a genealogist after all. We’re sleuths, aren’t we?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sooner or later a genealogy blog is going to reference Mormonism, however tangentially. My daughter’s third grade class has paired with a class in the Southwest; each pupil has a penpal in the other class. They have been trading letters filled with short, declarative sentences alternated with personal queries. My daughter\u2019s penpal: \u201c … Do […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-us-genealogy"],"yoast_head":"\nsleuthing & Mormonism - a genealogist's sketchbook<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/nltaylor.net\/sketchbook\/archives\/203\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"sleuthing & Mormonism - a genealogist's sketchbook\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Sooner or later a genealogy blog is going to reference Mormonism, however tangentially. 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