Facebook, Missions, and Dogged Librarians make Connections

Detective Solves ID of Interviewer and Interviewee

Sometimes a Blanding Connection is no further that a click away!

Heather Raisor as USU librarian in Blanding has been working with the SJCounty Historical commission and the University to digitize oral interviews which were conducted over the past 30 years.  A large amount of those were done by juniors in my English classes between 1986-1999, so if Heather runs into a tape without ID on it, she calls.  This particular story began September of 2017, when a particular tape showed up talking about horse racing, but neither of us could figure out who it might be.

Heather explained, "I made a small mp3 file and sent it to Janet and several other people to listen to and see if they recognized the voices. No one could.  

Next I drove out to see if I could find Aseneth Guymon to see if she could identify it [her son Tony is a jockey], but no one was home. Shortly afterwards, I happened to be at the Dr, Black's chiropractic office. For some reason I was telling them about it and there was a lady there, (don’t remember her name) but she recognized the interviewee's voice as Johnny Dufur's."

Half the mystery was solved, but Heather still didn’t know who the student doing the interview was. Sterling Black  thought it sounded like Dana Woodard, a friend from high school.  So she went on Facebook to try to find her. Found a Dana Woodard Adams and the following pictures are our text."  Heather sent her a mp3 file, and after listening to it this conversation evolved:

    

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Thanks to Facebook, the mystery was solved, the digital file identified and indexing completed.
Now fast forward six months............



         Reprise of the Search:   On March 15, 2018 Heather, Sterling, and Janet all happened to be all at the Chiropractor's office at the same time, and Sterling amazingly had found  an "artifact" -- the old 5 " floppy disc with both his research paper and Dana's on it!  So if we could open it up, we'd even have the transcript of that interview!!  Thanks Heather for being such a diligent detective.

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               New Stake President Loves Football and Family

Marilyn Lyman:

I need to add one more story to the Blanding Connection list because of its interest and importance to so many people. We are in Quartzsite AZ and just came from Stake Conference where Mitchell Kalauli Jr was sustained as the new Stake President in the Lake Havasu Stake. His wife is Nickie Patterson.  She is my brother, Kenneth's granddaughter. Her parents are Tierre and Kathy Patterson. Stephen Mosley's son Paul has been and will continue to be on the High Council down here.   He is also an Arizona State Representative.

Missionaries with Blanding Connections Serve in the South

Janet Wilcox: 

Our grandson Michael Wilcox has been serving in the Florida Tallahassee Mission for over a year. His parents are Chris and Pam Wilcox who live in Provo.  

Just this past fall, 2017, two Blanding young women were called to that same mission: Morgan Black (Sterling and Carrie Black's daughter)

 and Ashley Shumway (Caroline Shumway's daughter).  We'll soon be saying y'all, like they do!