An unexpected discovery

Exploring family stories through Church History

Each week I volunteer for a few hours at my local FamilySearch centre in Alnwick, Northumberland. It opened in January this year and since then I have met with dozens of amazing and fascinating people. I sit with these people and listen to their stories to help them to find out more about their family history.

Recently I was visited by a lady called Sheila. She is a Latter-day Saint who joined the Church in the 1960s with her husband. During the visit, she brought a stack of photographs with her which we began digitising using the centre’s equipment.

One of those was a small black-and-white photograph of a group of fourteen people in someone’s home. There is a grandfather clock in the background along with a floral patterned wall, photograph frames, and a fireplace. The four men and ten women were dressed formally and it appears that two photographs were being taken at the same time, at 9:20 pm (as per the grandfather clock), as most of the group was looking in one direction and others were staring in the direction of this photograph.

Sheila explained that the photograph was taken at her grandmother’s house in Shiney Row, Wallsend in the early 1930s. She was sure it was taken in 1933 and she had been told it was from a Mormon meeting. Two of the men, she explained, were not family members and she thought they were missionaries. Having heard about and seen this photograph before I decided we would try and get to the bottom of it and find out who these people were.

There probably aren’t many people in England who could have helped Sheila with this kind of challenge, but I began by looking at her relative’s FamilySearch profiles. We discovered, to Sheila’s great surprise, that her grandmother had been baptised in September 1933. Years earlier Sheila had travelled to the Family History Library and had been informed that none of her relatives who she knew had some interaction with the Church, had ever been baptised.

Next, we began looking to see what congregations there were in or around Wallsend in the early 1930s. Using The Latter-day Saints’ Millennial Star we were able to see that the closest congregations to Wallsend were either South Shields or Gateshead. For some reason, the Church seemed to do much better south of the River Tyne and that is where the congregations were located. Using that information the next step was to test the hypothesis of whether or not the two unidentified men were missionaries. We began looking through the Millennial Star and manuscript histories to find mention of any missionary transfers into South Shields or Gateshead. We developed a list of names and then headed to the ‘Church History Biographical Database’ (link here) and began looking at the names of the missionaries we had extracted.

That is when we met Heber I. Boden. Heber had spent time in South Shields and was a clerk for the Newcastle District conferences.¹ He later became a District President and eventually the British Mission secretary and treasurer.² From Heber’s FamilySearch profile we learned that he married after returning home from his mission, had some children, but then tragically died young in 1949. His photograph was a match - he was the suspected missionary in the front row.

Heber Boden from around the time of his mission.

The second missionary was a little more difficult and we came to no definitive conclusion. It could have been Sylvan Needham or Ralph Pomeroy, but I will need to do some more research first. The good news, however, just kept coming. Sheila and I reviewed some of the membership records available through the Church History Library. Inside the South Shields Branch records, we found two names that she recognised: Mary Jane Wilson and Catherine Wilson, her grandmother and her aunt. We learned that they had both been baptised that year, Mary in September and Catherine in November.

A year later Catherine married Frederick Melvin and moved to Eastbourne in the South of England. Frederick is the man in the centre of the above photograph. He too was investigating the Church but ultimately was never baptised. Sheila was blown away by the revelation. She knew her relatives had attended some meetings and would not drink tea or coffee (only a cup of hot water), but she was shocked to find they had actually been baptised members.

The whole experience was similar to being in a chase - going from one source to the next, finding leads and dead ends as we went along. As 9 pm rolled around we decided it was probably time to finish for the night but we had been able to substantiate the family story about the photograph, found out about the missionaries from that time, and also discovered that some of her relatives had been members of the Church.

What a rollercoaster it was for Sheila!

1. Heber I. Boden, ‘Newcastle District Conference,’ The Latter-day Saints’ Millennial Star, Vol. 95, No. 23 (1933), p. 398.

2. Walter K. Barton, ‘Nottingham District Conference,’ The Latter-day Saints’ Millennial Star, Vol. 96, No. 12 (1934), p. 189; ‘Welsh District Conference,’ The Latter-day Saints’ Millennial Star, Vol. 97, No. 10 (1935), pp. 157-158; and ‘From the Mission Field,’ The Latter-day Saints’ Millennial Star, Vol. 96, No. 29 (1934), p. 462.