Small World

From time to time, I read and occasionally comment on a couple of LDS-themed blogs, and have done so for about a year and a half now. It's an interesting diversion during the day, and rarely takes up any time. However, on one of them, there is a woman who has been doing some interesting posts about little known pioneers and others from Mormon History. She's done several at Times and Seasons, and one in particular caught my attention. She was talking about a missionary who went missing in Alabama in 1888. Southern States Mission President William Spry, later governor of Utah, sent a James Tilman to try and find out what had happened to the missionary. Tilman, a southern native, traveled undercover, and was able to eventually find the body, buried in a paupers grave, that could be identified as the missing missionary.

Ardis Parshall, the writer of this post, was trying to find out about Tilman, and said that later in the 1899 to 1900 time frame, he may have been in East Texas with a family by the name of Odom. That made me think about Heber Nephi Folkman, and his mission to Texas, so I was going to offer to search through HNF's missionary journals, of which I think Robert, David, and I all have copies of, to see if there was any mention of James Tilman. However, when I posted that my grandfather had been in Galveston for the great hurricane in 1900, someone piped up that he thought he knew who my grandfather was, and even his birthday. Turns out that Heber Nephi later found the children of the original Odoms, and got them baptized. I'm not sure where, and I'm trying to find out, but apparently Heber Nephi's missionary journals exist in a copy somewhere else that this other person has read, and was very familiar with. He said that in East Texas, Folkman was a name held in much reverence.

At any rate, Ardis wants to post about the missionaries who were in Galveston for the storm, and the records indicate that there may have been three others besides Heber Nephi. I'm going to try and dig out my copy and forward a scan of it to her, but she also thinks that the originals, or at least a copy of them, should be in the church archives. Not a bad thought, but a small world indeed.