Kirtland and some Family History

Since moving to the Midwest, Ryan and I have been able to visit some historical LDS sites. We were part of the Nauvoo stake in Missouri and traveled to Nauvoo and Carthage a few times. We went to Kansas City and visited Liberty Jail and Independence. Now that we are in Michigan, we decided to visit Kirtland which is only a few hours away. Since this weekend was going to be the last warm and sunny weekend of fall before it starts to turn into winter, we called some of our good friends and planed a little road trip!!

We went with the Irvins and the Childs and went to the Kirtland temple first. It is owned by the Community of Christ and they took us on a tour of the inside. We were all commenting afterward about how different the feeling we felt between the Community of Christ tour and other tours we have taken with LDS missionaries.

After the temple we went to the LDS visitors center. I remembered that a friend from BYU was serving a mission there and we actually ran into her at the visitiors center. It was fun to catch up since we haven't seen eachother for quite a while. We then toured around the town of Kirtland.

Paige was such a trooper the whole time. We stopped by the Whitney store and the tour guide told us how the owner kept a record of his customers and what they bought. Heres the family history part....

I knew that my dad's side of the family has a lot of pioneer stories, so I opened the book and went right to the Ws for Woods and saw the name Daniel Wood. I have heard that name a lot and felt pretty cool that his name was right there! I took a picture with my phone and texted my dad to make sure that that was the right Daniel Wood and it was. Daniel Wood was baptized by Brigham Youngs brother in Canada and then joined the saints in Kirtland. While they were building the Kirtland temple, people who were against the church tried to vandalize the temple. Daniel was one of the 50 armed guards that protected the temple at night. He then traveled with the saints to Missouri and then to Illinois. After Joseph Smith was killed and the saints began to travel out west, Brigham Young asked Daniel to stay and prepare for the second group to travel out west. He was told to plant seeds and harvest food for their company. He then traveled with the second group and arrived in the Salt Lake Valley. Later on he was called on a mission by Brigham Young. The city of Woods Cross Utah is named after Daniel Wood.

(Hope I got all that story right Dad)

It was a fun trip and now I can't wait until spring so we can make the trip to Palmyra New York!!!