Dear Family and Friends,
     We are just about to complete our first week as Family and Church History Missionaries in Salt Lake City.  On Thursday, Feb 2nd we extricated all of the belongings stuffed into the white Buick and lugged them up the stairs to apartment #33.  

MANY THANKS!! 
By the way, we cannot adequately express our appreciation to all who helped us over these past few months with your prayers and your deeds. You were involved in so many different ways: boxing up belongings and moving them to storage, cleaning the house, organizing and packing up family history and personal mission supplies and finally just getting out the door.  Some of you may have thought we would never leave!   
To our S.Calif. children: Enoch, Marissa, Lucille, Alma, Claudia (& Jonathan), Josh and Elsa.   To our "out of town" children: Luana and Carol for providing emotional and spiritual support and helping me gather my mission attire.  
To our dear friends: Nancy Peterson, Barbara Wiltsey, Luana Gilstrap, Linda Newsome, Ruth Turner, Bette Keesing, Carmen Wise, and Ursula Bennion who all contributed in meaningful, important ways.
We love you all and we pray that you will be blessed as we serve this mission for Our Heavenly Father and his Son, Jesus Christ.


Our apartment is bright, cheery, clean and and wonderfully well furnished. 

160 N 200 W #33 Salt Lake City, UT 84103

Flip Image right to left to get our apt layout

View from the Balcony - No wet snow

Our first day consisted of moving in, figuring out where to put everything, and stocking our pad with acorns and supplies for the winter.  Well, maybe not with acorns, but surely with almonds!





By the way, we immediately got to use of Enoch and Marissa's Christmas gift... a handy, dandy snow scraper (THANKS!)... in Beaver, UT.  Went to bed Wednesday night (Feb1) about midnight and woke up the next morning to an inch or so of snow.  Thankfully, it hasn't snowed since.  Wouldn't "moving in" through snow have been fun!?

The group who entered the Family and Church History Headquarters Mission Friday, Feb 3rd with us includes 6 other couples coming from places like S. Carolina, Calgary, Canada, Forrestville, CA (friends of Lu & Howard Gilstrap), Salem, Indiana,  Culpepper, VA,  and Arizona.  A lovely bunch of people.  In addition, we have 4 young elders.  
     During a delicious Orientation Luncheon held at noon in the gorgeous Joseph Smith Memorial Building (JSMB), we met the mission presidency and their wives and everyone briefly introduced themselves.  

Elder and Sister Mills with President & Sister Peterson

     We then went to the Training Center on 3rd floor of JSMB, were briefly oriented  and  met our individual trainers. Training began at that moment...  one hour only to get our "feet wet" so to speak. 
For the full two weeks of training, this tutor will teach us how to work in Personal Ancestral FIle (PAF), Family Insight, New Family Search (NFS), and how to do personal research.     

 Rick's trainer is Sister Shaffer. 

She is wonderful.  

 My trainer is Elder John Rogers 
and he is wonderful, too.

Both Elder Mills and I are thrilled with our mission experience.  Every day we thank God for the opportunity we have to serve this mission.  There is a  warm, strong spiritual feeling present as we seek to find and know our ancestors.  We are learning many new things everyday about how to do this. It is exciting to be learning and growing. 

We have trusted in the Lord.. that He will take care of you while we are away... that He will bless all our loved ones.  And it is my testimony that He began doing so even before we left home. We are most grateful for the many evidences we have seen of His involvement in your lives.  We have come to refer to them as "Mission Miracles". 

Love to you all,  

Elder & Sister Mills