Announcing RootsTech Pittsburgh 2015!

It's time to start getting excited for the second annual RootsTech Pittsburgh Family Discovery Day! This is a community family history event that will take place in Oakland on Saturday, June 13th from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. The event is free, but please do register in advance.

The Family Discovery Day is a time for members of the community to come together and celebrate family connections across generations. Participants are encouraged to use technology to discover, share, and celebrate their family roots.

You can attend RootsTech Pittsburgh for all or part of the day, making the event suit your individual needs as you seek out and build your family tree. At RootsTech you can learn through:

• Classes taught by genealogy experts. Each hour, about six or seven different classes are offered, with class topics ranging from African American Family History 101 to Google Your Ancestors to Indexing. Pick and choose which is most interesting and useful to you. Classes are aimed at varying levels of experience, and each hour there is a class particularly intended for youth ages 12-18. See the class schedule here. 
• Individualized help from consultants in the Internet Café. Family history consultants will be available to help you on your personal family history. Whether you just need to set up a basic FamilySearch account or you are trying to break through a brick wall in your research, the consultants in the Internet Café can help. 

Last year's RootsTech Pittsburgh was a great success. Over 200 people attended and learned more about how to strengthen their family ties. Check out the blog post and photos from RootsTech Pittsburgh 2014 to get a feel for what this year's RootsTech will be like.

Lunch will be available for purchase at cost, or you can bring or buy your own lunch in Oakland. Parking is free. See RootsTechPittsburgh.org, including our FAQ page, if you have more questions, or contact us through Facebook or by commenting below.

We're looking forward to an awesome event! Your attendance will make it a success.

Historian's Corner: A District Comes Before a Stake

This picture shows Imri Hutchings (standing at right), the second president of the West Penn District, along with his first counselor, Samuel Aston (standing at left), and several others at a district outing in South Park circa 1950.  President Hutchings’ wife, Bernice, is sitting in the back on the left, and Sister Emma Grace Hare, the first president of the district Relief Society, is sitting in front of her.  This picture appears in From These Hills and Valleys.

In October of 1943, Eastern States Mission President formed the West Penn District with Jay Wrathall as the district president.  President Wrathall had previously served as the president of the Pittsburgh Branch (which is now the Pittsburgh First Ward) from 1931 to 1933 and again from 1937 to 1943.

The district included three branches—Pittsburgh, Wilson (now the Pittsburgh Second Ward) and Washington as well as Sunday Schools in towns as far away as Johnstown and Carmichaels.  Wrathall and his counselors spent many Sundays traveling all around the district; their travel was facilitated by the clergymen’s coupons for gas that the district president had access to, this being during World War II when gas was rationed.  He was succeeded as district president by Clarence Bigler in 1947 and by Imri Hutchings in 1949.

When Hutchings was called to the position, there were 750 members in the three branches, but two of the branches were being led by missionaries, as there were very few Pittsburgh-area natives with Church leadership experience.  Hutchings chose leaders through inspiration and taught the members of the branches about “love and forgiveness,” as those who were called to lead were not always the most well-liked members.

He and his counselors also located members meeting in the more distant parts of the district and organized branches by starting with the most important auxiliary. “We found that the most successful way to start a branch was to start a Relief Society,” he explained.  Branches were organized in Butler, Punxsutawney, Johnstown and even East Liverpool, Ohio, during his tenure.  Hutchings also reached out to Saints in the region by holding leadership meetings with the Erie District and sending officers to conferences in Harrisburg and New York State, but the Erie meetings were less than successful; “there were so few (in attendance there) that most of the time we all traveled in one automobile.”

The West Penn District’s auxiliaries were also organized gradually during this period.  The district Relief Society was organized in 1949 and went through many of the same challenges of transportation and communication as its predecessor in the West Pennsylvania Conference.  These challenges were exacerbated by the geographic area of the district, which stretched from Wintersville, Ohio, to Johnstown, but they were met with unfailing resolve.

The first elders quorum in the district, which was called the Second Quorum of Elders since there was a First Quorum in Philadelphia, wasn’t organized until 1958, and it started out with just 75 elders scattered across ten branches.  However, as with the rest of the local Church membership, the Second Quorum grew fairly quickly, as a Third Quorum had been formed by 1963.

The growth of the Church organization in the Pittsburgh area continued apace in the 1960s.  On November 13, 1960, the Eastern Atlantic States Mission (which included Pittsburgh) was formed from the Eastern States Mission.  Two days later, Hutchings was succeeded as district president by Frank Young, who held the position until the Pittsburgh Stake was formed in 1969.

In 1963, the West Penn District sent out its first full-time missionary, Sister Erma Wollensack of the Pittsburgh Branch.  The foundation for her successors as missionaries from Pittsburgh began to be laid two years later, when the district’s first seminary class took place in Upper St. Clair, a distant southern suburb of the city.

And in 1967, the missionary effort within the district was enhanced with the formation of the West Penn District Mission, which was roughly equivalent to the (now-discontinued) stake missions of more recent years and the ward missions that continue to exist.  The district mission’s first president was Orrin Hatch, a native of the Pittsburgh suburb of Baldwin who presently serves as a US Senator representing Utah.

The dreams of the members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in southwestern Pennsylvania to have a fully formed Church organization in their area finally came to fruition at the end of the 1960s with the formation of the Pittsburgh Pennsylvania Stake.  But that is another tale for another post.  Until next time…

Respectfully submitted,

Rush David

Pittsburgh Stake Historian

Historian's Corner: A Conference Comes Before a District

A plaque in the Second Ward building charts the congregation’s evolution from one of the first branches in the Pittsburgh area to a suburban ward in the Pittsburgh Stake

To pick up from where we left off the last time, the modern history of the Church here began in 1886, when a conference was convened at the New England Branch (near the present-day location of the Pittsburgh Second Ward) on May 16-17.  The members of the branch had asked to be re-baptized into the Church the year before.  Another branch was organized that same year in Little Redstone in Fayette County (further south of Pittsburgh) and three more followed in 1887.

At that time, western Pennsylvania was under the jurisdiction of the Indiana Conference, a “conference” in this sense being a smaller version of a district.  The process of re-introducing the Church into the eastern United States was long and difficult.  It was likely made more difficult by the legal proceedings undertaken against the Church in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

Western Pennsylvania was transferred to the Northern States Mission in 1889 and then to the Eastern States Mission in 1897.  The Eastern States Mission had been organized in 1893 when Elders Job Pingree and Seymour B. Young Jr. were dispatched to New York City to restart missionary efforts in the East following the resolution of the Church’s legal difficulties.  The mission was headquartered in Brooklyn and included New York, Maryland, the southern part of West Virginia, New England and eastern Canada in addition to Pennsylvania.

The mission expanded into Virginia shortly thereafter and counted 975 members in eight conferences by the year 1900.  Thirty years later, the mission counted 4,281 members in twelve organizational units, which by this point included districts and conferences; the Pittsburgh area was part of the West Pennsylvania Conference.

Despite having so many members, the mission counted only six chapels, including two in Pennsylvania.  During these early days of the Church, each branch was a handful of families that met in different members’ homes at varying times.  This was generations before the current consolidated meeting schedule was introduced (that occurred in 1980), so there was no organizational expectation of so much to take place on Sunday as there is now.

Two of the main priorities of the early branches were creating Sunday Schools and Relief Societies.  The first record of the latter in Pittsburgh dates from May 25, 1916, when a Relief Society presidency for the branches in the area was called.  The members of the presidency lived far apart and could not meet often, owing to the difficulty of transportation and communication in those days.  This also contributed to the fact that the Relief Society presidency’s membership changed three times in the ensuing year.

The challenges of leadership were ameliorated in 1922, when Sister Marble Holmgren was called as the Eastern States Mission’s first mission-wide Relief Society President.  She traveled around the mission to instruct the sisters in their duties, visiting the city of Pittsburgh on October 1, the Fairview Branch (in Butler County, north of Pittsburgh) on October 18 and the New England Branch on October 25.  Three years later, the five branches in the area organized their own Relief Societies.

From 1941 until 1963, the wives of mission presidents were asked to “take direct charge” of the Relief Society work in their missions’ areas.  This provided the relatively young branches with a veteran leader who may likely have had experience in areas with a fully formed Church organization.

The next step in the evolution of the Church in the Pittsburgh area came in 1943, when the West Penn District was organized.  But that is another tale for another post.  Until next time…

Respectfully submitted,

Rush David

Pittsburgh Stake Historian

Historian's Corner: In The Beginning . . .

The picture shows Pittsburgh as seen from Mount Washington (or “Coal Hill” as it was then known) in the early 1850s.  It is the cover illustration for the book From These Hills and Valleys.

Hello, friends.  My name is Rush David, and I am the Stake Historian for the Pittsburgh Stake.  In this blog post, I will discuss the earliest history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints here in southwestern Pennsylvania.

The Church was organized on April 6, 1830, in Fayette, New York.  During the next twenty years, the center of Church activity moved from Fayette to Kirtland, Ohio; Jackson County, Missouri; and Nauvoo, Illinois, before ultimately moving to the Salt Lake Valley in what later came to be known as Utah.

The Church did not leave Pittsburgh (which was then a small town with a population of around 15,000) untouched in its earliest years.  A number of prominent early missionaries of the Church served in the area in the 1830s, including Hyrum Smith, Samuel H. Smith, William Smith, Orson Pratt, Jedediah M. Grant, Brigham Young, and Erastus Snow.  In addition, one of the original members of the First Presidency, Sidney Rigdon, was a native of the town now known as Library.

A branch of the Church existed in Pittsburgh from 1830 until approximately 1840.  The branch had 169 members and 7 elders in its membership during that period; there were 830 members and 29 elders in all of Pennsylvania.  The area was within the boundaries of what was later known as the Eastern States Mission, which was headquartered in New York City and held semiannual conferences in Philadelphia for a few years in the early 1840s.

In time, however, the severe persecution that the Church faced in Missouri and Illinois, as well as the difficulty of communicating across long distances and the Church’s center moving to Utah, led to most of its members who lived east of the Mississippi River migrating to the Salt Lake Valley.  Missionaries were withdrawn from the East in 1857, and the Civil War (1861-1865) put a damper on Church activity in both the North and South.

The book From These Hills and Valleys notes that “Church records pertaining to growth and activity for this area are practically non-existent from 1840 until approximately 1885.” However, there was at least one branch in the area in 1885.

For organizational purposes, the modern history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in southwestern Pennsylvania is considered to have begun in 1886, when a conference was convened at the New England Branch (near the present-day location of the Pittsburgh Second Ward) on May 16-17.  The members of the branch had asked to be re-baptized into the Church the year before.

This is how the Church began here, but there’s so much more to tell beyond this.  Until next time . . . 

Respectfully submitted,

Rush David

Pittsburgh Stake Historian 

Welcome to the Historian's Corner!

Hello, friends. My name is Rush David, and I am the Stake Historian for the Pittsburgh Stake. As part of my calling, I have been asked to contribute one post per month to this blog regarding the history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints here in southwestern Pennsylvania.

Initially, most of my posts will feature stories and pictures that first appeared in From These Hills and Valleys, a book about the history of the Church in this area that was published in 1986 as part of the centennial celebration of the Church’s presence here. I have only been Stake Historian for six months, so I have not accumulated a great deal of information concerning the Church’s local history. In time, however, I intend to present more recent historical information about the Church in this area.

My goal in doing all of this is to help you get a better sense of where the Church has come from, how it has gotten to where it is now, and where it may conceivably be going in the future. I am grateful for all of you who will be coming with me on this journey through the history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints here in southwestern Pennsylvania.

Until next time . . .

Respectfully submitted,

Rush David
Pittsburgh Stake Historian