Joe's & Julia's Adventures: The Stories

We greatly enjoyed being full time servants of the Lord as missionaries in The Bahamas in 1996-97. We taught the gospel of Jesus Christ and helped train leadership in our church's congregations in Nassau. The people we met and the experiences we had abundantly blessed our lives.

1996 at the Missionary Training Center, Provo, Utah

After we returned from our 15 month mission we felt impressed to collect the history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in The Bahamas. We consulted archivists and librarians at the Church History Department and Brigham Young University - Harold B. Lee Library to make sure our finished product would be acceptable to archives and researchers. The church was formally organized in The Bahamas in the late 1970s. All the pioneers were still alive and full of memories and stories. In 1999 we conducted our first oral history interview. Throughout the next decade we traveled all over the country and made numerous trips to The Bahamas to conduct 130 interviews with 198 people. All in all, we interviewed

100 locals – Bahamians, Jamaicans, Haitians

19 American expatriates

27 mission presidents & wives

37 senior missionaries

14 missionaries (young)

1 lawyer for the church

You might ask why this matters. Why is the material important and useful? First of all, people's stories need to be preserved. In addition, from the very beginning, the church in Nassau has consisted of people from a variety of nations, languages, races, educational backgrounds, and cultures. This makes it an interesting and instructive story on many levels.

We started this project with the goal of writing "the book" on The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its members in The Bahamas. As we talked with people, we realized it was very important to collect stories while the people were still alive - and able to remember their experiences. We wanted the materials to be transcribed and organized in a way that they could be readily accessed and understood by researchers. Our focus switched from writing the book to collecting and transcribing as many stories as we could.

Here's what we accumulated - 5 file drawers and 4 bins of papers; memorabilia; audiotapes; VHS tapes; print, digital and slide images; and hundreds of digital files.

Along the way we made presentations at national conferences to share insights and stories. We met wonderful people throughout this almost two decade journey.

Through fundraising we collected money to hire two transcribers. Our transcribers were excellent but without a thorough knowledge of the people, the history, and the Bahamian dialect, it is possible for errors to creep into the transcripts. So we are listening to each interview and checking it against the transcript. About 1/3 of the transcripts are finished. It's going to take a while to finish the other 2/3s.

It's now 2014. It's time to revise our definition of "finished." We are not going to live forever. We do have some other big projects we want to work on. It's time to admit that someone else will have to write the articles and "the book." Our job is to finish auditing the transcripts and to turn over wonderful, deep, rich, research-ready material.

The last week of December Clint Christensen, a friend and archivist with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints came to the Seattle area to interview us and several other people. He also went through our files to see what kinds of things would be appropriate for the Church Archives.

Clint loaded over half our collection into his red van to take back to Salt Lake City. It was a very strange feeling to see the van drive off with our materials. We are thrilled that someone wants them, that someone feels they are of value to the historical record, that someone feels they will be of use to researchers and writers. On the other hand, we were filled with thoughts about what we wished we'd done better, done more of, made time for ...... - all those thoughts you have when a much loved project comes to a major transition point.