I learned something today: Aalborg is way way up north in Denmark.
Hannah has been in Aalborg since October. I read about Aalborg when she first got there, and just some how believed that she was in the far south of Denmark, near Germany.
I was wrong!
We have a world map in our dining room, and I keep saying that I need to print a map of Denmark, but I just haven't done it.
Can you see it up there? It's about as far north as you can go...
You can also see that Denmark is at the southern edge of Scandinavia.
Aalborg is in North Jutland. There's a lot of Viking history there, and some LDS history, too.
Here's a little bit of LDS church history in Denmark:
At the October 1849 general conference, Apostle Erastus Snow was assigned to establish the Church in Scandinavia, and Peter O. Hansen was called to serve as a missionary to Denmark. Hansen, a native of Copenhagen, was one of the first Danes to accept the gospel, having received baptism while temporarily living in Boston in 1844. Once converted, Hansen moved to Nauvoo, then migrated with the Saints to the Great Salt Lake Valley in 1847. There, he completed the Danish translation of the Book of Mormon he had begun at Nauvoo in 1845.
When it was announced that Elder Snow and Hansen would work in Scandinavia, John E. Forsgren, a Swedish convert, petitioned and was granted an opportunity to also be called to the work. The three men left Utah in October 1849, arriving in Copenhagen the following spring.
Within two months, the elders had established the headquarters of a mission in Copenhagen. The first baptisms took place on 12 August 1850 in the Oeresund near Copenhagen. The group of converts included eight men and seven women, with Ole C. U. Moenster being the first. The first branch was organized in Copenhagen on 15 September 1850. George P. Dykes established a second branch in Aalborg on 25 November 1850. By April 1851, the Aalborg branch contained 91 members.
I also found an article in the Deseret News that said that the little hall that the church used for meetings had been all torn down by a mob in June of 1851...
I'm glad things are safer for missionaries in Aalborg today! Right now in Aalborg there are 8 full time missionaries serving in Aalborg - one set of Sisters, two sets of Elders, and one married couple. That seems like a lot of missionaries, but it also seems like Hannah and her companion are pretty busy working and teaching. It is an exciting time!
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| Søster Barrett and Søster Packard |
Every Monday I get Hannah's email, and spend the morning copying it into a file, printing it to read to the family at FHE, posting it to her blog, and sharing it on Facebook. It is all missionary all the time on Mondays. Sometimes I even wake up at about 4am so I can see her email come in to my account, and write back quick if I have a question or need something. I'm pretty sure that email chatting is not really mission approved, but once in a while I need to check an address or something... so fun!
Sister Packard is a cousin of some of our friends. Small world! My friend recently forwarded a couple of letters from her cousin, Søster P- it has been really fun to read about Hannah's mission from another angle! Such cute girls!
Yay for missionaries!
