Visiting Ancestors

Kimball family monument

Heber Chase Kimball 1801-1868

part of the Kimball monument

Wednesday we took our daily break and went for a walk a few blocks north of the Family History Library to try and locate the grave site of Heber Chase Kimball. I am related to him on my Mother's side of the family, of course back a few generations! We were wondering if he was to be found by the directions we had but when we came across the Heber condominiums we figured we had to be close. There was a narrow brick walkway between two buildings that went back behind them all to an old family burial plot of the family. It was really quite a picturesque little place with the look and feel of a small park. Very beautifully kept as are all the church grounds.

What an unusual place it was to find right in the middle of a City, surrounded by homes and renovated condo buildings. That was the final resting place of Heber Kimball and several of his wives and family members, marked by one large monument to honor them all. Heber Chase Kimball was an early part of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints and one of the early Presidents of the Church. The town of Heber, Utah is named for him. He was born in 1801 and died in the Salt Lake City area of the early Utah Territory after an illustrious career and life with his church. The museum which is next door to the Family History Center has several personal items of Heber on display too so it was quite interesting to see those as well as to visit his burial site.

While I am not of the Mormon faith, the Latter day Saints have an extremely interesting and honored history and "The You Go Girls" really enjoyed our little day outing when we learned more about our family and payed respects to our ancestors!

more pretty Poppy flowers!

We topped off our little adventure with a nice lunch at the Nauvoo cafe in the Joseph Smith Memorial building and soon were back at the library hard at work as there are many more ancestors yet to be found.

Today we are joining our friends Becky and Carol, fellow GeneaBloggers for lunch.....so watch for reports soon!

You Go Genealogy Girl #2--Cheri

The Four "Belles" of GeneaBloggers...in Salt Lake City!

GeneaBloggers: Cheri Hopkins, Ruby Coleman, Carol Stevens and Becky Wiseman

Today was day four of our trip to the Family History Library in Salt Lake and to our surprise we met two other gals in the library today who are also bloggers,"GeneaBloggers", to be exact! Becky Wiseman of Kinexxions and Carol Stevens of  Reflections From The Fence. The four of us took a short break to visit and compare finds and funny stories, it was fun to meet new friends who immediately seemed like "old friends". Carol and Becky were really nice and another researcher kindly took our photos for posterity. Surely everyone in the library must have thought we were all very special as we posed for the cameras. You never know who you might meet here, yesterday we ran into Michael John Neill of RootDig.com and today we made new genealogy friends.....this has been a good week so far! Who will we meet tomorrow?

The girls had a nice lunch out on the town and both did well with locating many great family records today, the sun even came out for awhile so we are making progress. We are still looking for warm weather here though, glad I brought along my Nebraska cold weather clothes. Even many of the flowers are late here in Salt Lake City this year but those that are out are bright and colorful as usual.

Enjoy one pretty picture of the beautiful white iris here and especially the one of the four gorgeous genealogy "Belles" above!

You Go Genealogy Girl #2, Cheri

white iris in Salt Lake City