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[00:00:00] Emily Utt's job has been described as being like the Indiana Jones of church history sites. She doesn't just sit at a desk and research church history. Instead, she crawls through attics in the homes of early church leaders on her hands and knees trying to become acquainted with what she calls sacred spaces.

So what makes these places sacred? Well, that's what she shares with us on today's episode. Emily, Utt has worked for almost two decades. Preserving and sharing the stories of the most significant places managed by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Emily has been involved in preservation projects ranging from 1820s log structures to 1970s new formalist landmarks around the world.

Emily holds a master's degree in historic preservation. This is all in an LDS Living podcast where we ask the question, what does it really mean to be all in the. Gospel of Jesus Christ. I'm Morgan Pearson and I am so honored to have Emily Utt on the line with me today. Emily, welcome. It's good to be here.

Well, I have told Emily this, but Emily and I have several mutual friends who I love and adore, and so if we're not good friends by the end of this interview, I'm gonna be disappointed. Emily. I feel like we already are friends. Okay. I actually, I stalked you a little on Facebook as well. I'm like, we need to talk about how we know some of the same people.

This is. Yes. Do like the mutual friend run through. I'll take it. I'd love that. Yes. Yeah. Um, but I do know the friends that I do know that we have in common, I. Just think the world of, and they think the world of you. So, um, I want to start with, I feel like you have spent more time in the sacred spaces of the church than most of us would ever dream of.

So I wondered if you could start us off by sharing, what would you say constitutes or makes a, a sacred [00:02:00] space? That is a fantastic question. I, when we, you hear the phrase sacred space, usually what comes to mind is a church or a synagogue or a temple or some type of place that has been dedicated to the worship of God.

Uh, those are absolutely sacred spaces, those places that we have dedicated to honor him. But I think sacred spaces are more than that. They may be very, very individual. They may be more local to a community. I think of a sacred space is anywhere that we can go to feel the hand of the Lord in our lives.

And it may be literally your closet or it may be somewhere outside, but a sacred space is anywhere. Where I feel God working with me. And so there may be places that we go that are not on the top of our heads, places that are sacred, right? There's places that are hard and places that are difficult, but some of those places are the most sacred to me because I feel God with me in those hard moments.

So anywhere where God is with me is there. Well, I feel like having just studied and having fresh in our minds the Liberty Jail sections of doctrine and covenants, it's like anywhere the Lord can work anywhere, even in this gross prison. So I love that definition. I also think about, you know, you reading the Book of Mormon, the waters of Mormon locations.

Mm-hmm. Know how beautiful are the waters of Mormon? And they say the name about 17 times. Yeah. 'cause there they came to know God. And so I love, as I travel the world. Finding and learning about people's waters and Mormon locations. I imagine. Imagine every person in the world has a place that would be their waters and Mormon, and how beautiful is that [00:04:00] place for there?

They came to know God. There was a missionary on my mission who, it was probably like my first zone conference, and the departing missionaries were bearing their testimonies and he, he read that scripture, but he substituted in different places around our mission and I have never forgotten that, that, that, that for him, it was like the street corner by this like that is where I came to know God and I, I think that's really.

Really neat to think about, like what are our sacred spaces? Is it a mango tree? Yes. Is it a, is it your bedroom, right, or is it the pulpit at the meeting house that you attend? All of them are right maybe right. I love that. Emily, you have said that your job is to help us connect to the sacred spaces in our church's history.

How have you seen this ability for these places to provide connection for us as Latter Day Saints? I go back to the very first commandment that the church was given on the day it was organized. So Section 1 21, the very first verse on the very first day, um, of the church's organization, the Saints were commanded to keep a record and they were commanded to remember.

So you read in the Sacrament prayers, you read in Moroni that we are commanded as a people to remember. To keep that heritage and I think about all the time, why, why is it so important that we remember, and if you read in in Moroni chapter 10, that we are commanded to remember how merciful the Lord has been.

We are commanded in, um, doctrine Covenant Section 69 to keep a record for the good of the church and for the rising generation. So I think it's important to connect with our heritage, to connect with [00:06:00] the past because we need to see the hand of God working in our lives. We need to see that God is merciful to his children throughout all generations of time.

And we need that physical reminder. It's not just an an emotional sense that God loves us, right? We need that physical place. If you even go back into the Old Testament. As the Israelites are now crossing the Jordan River into the Promised Land, they've been wandering for 40 years in the wilderness. The first thing they do is build a monument, and they remember that God has been merciful to them.

So for me, there's a power in the physicality of memory, you know, that you think about the most important event in your life. I bet if I asked you the most, you know, you could tell me what it looked like and what it smelled like and what it sounded like on that moment of that important event for you.

And whenever you smell or hear or see something similar, it takes you back to that, to that moment. Do you remember that moment that changed you? And, and you kind of get a little bit reinforced to, to go out and do it again. I mean, the, I I think about the, my, my great aunt wore a certain perfume her whole life and occasionally, and I inherited a few things of hers when she passed away.

And occasionally that the whiff of her perfume hits me when I'm walking to my house. And it's that strange moment. 'cause whenever I smell that, I stop. And I remember my aunt. And I kind of recommit to the principles of life that she taught me. So I think it's important we, we are commanded to remember, but it's good for us to know where we've come from.

Um, and it teaches us how [00:08:00] to be more resilient. I think moving forward. My, uh, my dad and my, my grandmother passed away. About 10 years ago and probably four years after she passed away, my dad was driving, he, he drove her car for several years after she passed and I was like, how does it still smell like my grandma?

Like, was her perfume really that strong? And then I realized that my dad had stuck a bottle of her perfume in the door of the car. I'm like, you are, you are very sentimentally. You little guy. Yeah. But no, I love that. And I, I think too. It makes me think of the sacrament, right? That that is the reason that we're given this physical reminder every weekend, and how often do we actually stop and take that for what it is.

But, but if we did, if we took the sacrament the way it's intended, um, how powerful that would be for us. No, AI sacrament does not do the same thing you need. No. You need the real thing. And I imagine, you know, every time you smell your grandma's perfume in your dad's car, you're like, oh yeah, grandma. Right, right.

She, she loved me. Well, and, and I think that there, like you said, there's power in those smells, tastes, things like that to take us back to a, a space and a feeling. So I think that's a neat thing to think about and maybe we can continue to think about that as we go through this conversation. I also was thinking about, I had a.

In college to spend a couple of weeks in Navu and I was grateful for people like you who had put in work to make those historic sites so special because I had some, some neat experiences there. Emily, you have said that you love the work you do because you love seeing the [00:10:00] similarities between your life and the lives of the people in our history.

Could you give me examples of that? Oh, so many examples. So I don't even know where to start. One, one story, that kind of experience that comes to mind. So I went to school in Cleveland, Ohio, and as one does, when one goes to school in Cleveland, all of our YSA activities were at the historic sites in Kirtland.

And there was one particular. Fall day that we were holding our YSA dance in the barn behind the John Johnson farm. It's such a weird sentence whenever that comes outta my mouth. But that's what we did in Ohio. And I had spent, you know, my entire college, I'd been through institute and thinking about these, these people and, and I, as I'm out at that barn dance, I'm thinking about Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdry and Eliza R.

Snow and these young people. These, you know, I, I would, at the time was just turned 21 and Joseph and Oliver in Ohio in the 1830s were just a few years older than me. They're like, you know, 25 and I am overwhelmed with the prospect of the future. What's gonna happen in my life? And so I start thinking while I'm at that dance about Joseph and Hiram and Oliver and all these people that we study in church history, and the thought came to me as I was standing in that place that they didn't know what the future held either.

But they had enough faith to trust God, to listen to the revelations, to follow the spirit, and to keep going. And if Joe and I can look back at Joseph, and I knew for him what was coming, I knew all the hard things, but I could have faith like them to trust. And in that [00:12:00] moment of panic of what's the next thing in my life, um, I look to them for an example.

Um, and, and it kind of gave me the little push I needed to make the next step, and I decided to serve a mission and, and do all of that. Another, oh, like another example of, of somebody that I love, the saints living at the far corners of the earth. Who want to attend the temple, right? And it takes days, weeks, to get to the temple.

You have to get on a bus and you might sell everything you have and quit your job to go to the temple. And then they get to the temple finally. And now they're gonna spend a week doing as many ordinances as they can. And so when I, you know, who live two miles from a temple going, you know what, it's a little inconvenient for me to go tonight.

I'd rather go home and read a book and, you know, whatever. I think about those saints and I'm like, you know, they would, if they lived two miles from a temple, they would be here every single day. So maybe I can go every week. And I see those similarity, you know that we are, you, you change the date and the name and our lives are the same.

We, we deal with the same questions, the same problems. How do I, how do I find a job? How do I serve in the church? How do I raise kids? How, how do I keep the commandments when it seems hard? Those questions are the same and haven't changed in thousands of years, but we now have cell phones and all those things on top of it.

But other than that, we're the same. Right. The lesson and principle beneath the issue is the same. Yeah. I [00:14:00] I, there's a quote that I love and I should pull it because I feel like I reference it so often, but Patricia Holland. In her book, A Quiet Heart, she says something to the effect of like, we do ourselves a disservice when we put up these artificial barriers and think that we can't understand one another's experience because it's different.

Because at the root of it, we're all. Learning the same things. Mm-hmm. And I think that that is so true, and I love the idea. I've never thought of it though about throughout history, like the, the lesson, the principle is the same. Yeah. I love that you went to school in Cleveland. And from what I understand, you said that you were scared by how much I knew about you, Emily, when I sent these questions over, I, you know how, like you are a historian, so you go and learn about these people and basically stalk them.

I stalk you. Yeah. I, I joke that I Google, you know, I can find dead people for a living. So the, the living are easy, but, um, yes, that. Yeah, exactly. I've got the easier job of the two of us for sure. Yeah. So I don't know why you would be surprised that I was able to find information on you. It's fine. But I, I love that you went to school in Cleveland and I love that, like that was what initially drew you to church history.

From what I understand is that you had this family who had roots in Ohio. Is that right? I, no, I, I fell in love with church history. Listening to family stories in my childhood. Okay. I grew up with a family where our family, my, that, that aunt that I, I spoke about a little earlier, she loved her grandmother.

And talked about her all the time, and I was, I was named for my great-grandmother. And so I grew up hearing as a very young age, the stories of, of our past. And so as I [00:16:00] grew up, I, I, I knew our family story and I knew the stories of resilience on both sides of my family. And I decided I wanted to be, I wanted to do it for a living, but I had no idea.

You, you even could, right? I thought that if you got a history degree. You had to become a teacher because the only professional historians I knew were the people teaching me history in high school, and I didn't know it was an option to do something else. And then I moved to Ohio for school and a whole world opened up and.

Changed, uh, the course of everything for me. Yeah. Well, I think it's amazing. I always feel like you have lawyers and doctors and teachers, but the number of jobs that we just have no idea exist. And I think, you know, we hear the title of your job, which is. Preservation curator, what's, what's your official title, Emily?

I, I feel like my title constantly changes sometimes. I am a historic sites curator. Okay. And, um, currently my, my focus is historic building specialist. Oh, that sounds exciting. Yeah. Yeah, right. But yeah, you like there's no aptitude test in high school that says you should become a professional historian.

Exactly. So I feel like too, I was, one of the things that I was watching previous interviews that you've done, the person was like, you are not just like sitting at a desk. You like put on a hard hat and crawl through. Attics and crawl spaces, and you're like, Indiana Jones. And I was like, Emily, what a boss.

That's a lot of fun too. I, I think I, I tell people that I can't write about a building I've never seen. You have to be on the ground. Yeah. No photograph is ever going to substitute for standing in the space. So yeah. [00:18:00] What I, what I love about this work is the ability, it's that the, that intersection you spend time in the archive.

You spend time on site and you have to spend a lot of time with people and it's this fun combination of all of the skill sets that I didn't even know could be combined into one job. It's a lot of fun. Do you ever feel like, man, I have like a one of one job, so I in many ways created my position. Okay.

Yeah, because no one else had this, had the training when I, when I started graduate school in this, and I try to explain the kind of combination of my job to, to my colleagues, classmates in my graduate program, and I often just get this kind of confused look. Because it's the best of all worlds in preservation, um, and the most fun.

So yeah, sign up for it. You may have to carve your own niche in the industry, but it's the best kind of work. Yeah. Yeah. Um, okay, so you have worked on. Some pretty incredible projects. And from what I understand, your first preservation project was the Provo Tabernacle, and you were assigned three days after the fire that consumed the tabernacle.

Mm-hmm. You said you didn't know what you were doing, but I wonder when you walked into the Tabernacle, like what does your approach to that preservation project look like? So Provost was especially interesting. I was in my first semester of graduate school when the building burned down. Okay? So I was, I had taken one class, the basics of preservation theory and, and just had to figure it out.

So the, the first thing I that I learned is that you [00:20:00] is surround yourself with people who know more than you. So those early first days in Provo, I made sure I was standing next to the construction manager at all times and I would ask John all of my stupid questions, just dumb questions, and he was so patient answering them.

I had to ask him where to buy steel toe work boots. I had no idea. So step one is always surround yourself with, with smart people. Okay. Create the network. And then I was also fortunate because I was in graduate school at the time, I had a. Professors who could help guide me through what this was going to look like.

So I became familiar with the federal standards for historic preservation very, very quickly. So anyone who's interested in preserving or being connected with the historic space, there are all kinds of resources put out by the federal government to help us understand how to do that. And then as I got more and more into it, I always start with trying to understand the story.

Why does this place matter and more than just the date that it was constructed or the architectural style, you know, we could, I could go on for hours about the construction material and all of that, but I always like to start as with why does this place matter? Why is this place important? And then go from there.

So. There's a couple a few things that an old boss used to talk about as we are getting into what places to preserve and how to preserve them, that she taught me three principles in that, and one, the first principle is really this idea is we want to be accurate. So if I, I need to know, was that piece of wood really installed in 1894?

And I could give you all the [00:22:00] details of how I know a certain piece of wood was installed in 1894. You know, the type of nail used, the type of saw used that I, all of that. But we want to be as accurate as possible. We want to know is this the place that it actually happened? And then the other, the second principle is relevance.

Does it matter? I could give you a five hour lecture on the history of sawmill production in northeast Ohio in the 1830s, but for the Kirtland Sawmill, that story doesn't matter as much as this profitable business was used to build the Kirtland temple. So as I am restoring that building, right, we're maintaining that building.

It's not about the sawmill, it's about how did that sawmill help restore the church? Then the third aspect we often talk about is appropriateness. There's a lot of stories that we could tell, but not all of them are appropriate to share publicly. I think about some of the most sacred events in my life, I don't share them widely because they're sacred to me.

Mm-hmm. And so as I think about what stories to share, how to share them, is it appropriate for that audience and for that place? So I start with those principles and then you have to spend just a lot of time with the building. I, we joke that a building will tell us what it needs, so you go and you spend time in it.

I like to, you know, sometimes early morning, sometimes late at night, you just, you just get to know the building. Buildings are records and sources, just as paper is. If you, if you're trained well, if you know a few words, you can read a building. Like you can a book. Hmm. And then you take all that together and combine it and, and you just take your time.

I think the other, one of the other principles is that this type of work takes time. You don't become an expert in it [00:24:00] in a couple of weeks of study, right? Or, um, it takes years sometimes to know the source and, and so people will often say, well, how do you know so much? I'm like, well, because I've devoted my entire, my entire adult life.

To understanding this and you know, you don't just read one book, you read six and you go deep and then you go back and read it again. I'm constantly surprised with build even buildings. I think I know really well a project will start and will learn something that will completely change our understanding of the building.

Interesting. So being, being flexible with it as well. I wanna go back really quickly to that idea of appropriateness. Mm-hmm. I love, thank you for sharing all of those points. I am, I'm curious mm-hmm. When we talk about appropriateness, 'cause I feel like when, when you're speaking about your own experience, it's like following your.

You know, and, and trying to follow the spirit about what would be appropriate and what would not. Obviously the spirit can help you when it's somebody else's experience as well, but do you ever feel like you are getting help from those people on the other side being like, I'd rather you not share that, or, I have a feeling often that someday we will meet the people that we are talking about and that we will, you know, we will meet them in person.

Because if you read about the celestial kingdom, right, all that, this idea that we are all there sealed and covenanted together. And so I, I work really hard at being as merciful with them as I can be. Um, acknowledgement that I, if, you know, I wouldn't say it to your face, I probably shouldn't say it behind your back.

I love that. Um, so I want to be kind to them, but I also feel that there are times that. There are stories that they want told [00:26:00] and contributions that they want shared. And part of our, the part of the work we do in preservation, part of the work we do in history is bringing to light the stories of people that maybe have been forgotten.

One of my favorite themes is that when we are working in a building and a little time capsule is discovered, or a signature right, and then I get to go down the rabbit hole and find them. And that moment when I find the person who wrote their name or left a poem in a wall, it's just this, this little thrill because now I have a picture and I have a story.

It's not just nameless, faceless pioneers who sacrificed, you know, it's, it's Peter and I know Peter and I know John and I know Rebecca. Right. And these are very, very real. People. So, yeah, so I think we want to be very careful with their names because I want people to be careful with my name too, for some reason.

You saying that got me a little choked up? I, I think that we, yeah, I think sometimes the, these people in church history, we just kind of throw their names around as if they're not real human beings, and I don't think that's fair. Emily, we obviously don't all have to study or work in church history to fill a connection to our, our ancestry or our heritage, but I wondered, what would you say, um, is the power in learning stories of our ancestors?

You talked about your ancestors and how that learning their stories was what made you interested in church history? But also spending time in these places, like why is it worth people's effort to get to some sacred spaces and to spend time in those places? Okay, so there is. [00:28:00] So in the 1940s, the National Park Service was interested in how do we share the story of the national parks?

How do we interpret the past? And so they hired this, a man named Freeman Tilden, to write a book to teach us how to interpret the past. And he said. Surely to stand at the rim of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado is to experience a spiritual elevation that could come from no human description of the colossal chasm.

So to put that into human terms, there is no substitute for standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon. Mm-hmm. You know, we, we can write about it, we can read the books, we can take the virtual tour, but there's something powerful about standing there. And I think we live in a world that is increasingly digital and we are constantly wondering, is this real?

Is this fake? Is, did AI do this? You know, we, we all know what it's like to go to church during Zoom when you're awkwardly sitting at home on your couch trying to connect. And the more digital the world is becoming and the more fake. In many ways, I think there is this desire that we want the real theme, that we want to stand at the edge of the Grand Canyon.

We want to stand in the place where our Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ appear to Joseph Smith. We want to know that God is real and that he is there. For me, there is this part of this desire to preserve historic places, and part of the desire is to share these stories is because it helps me connect with something that is real.

You know, that you can't stand in a [00:30:00] sacred place and not feel something. And, and I think is that we know that we want to attend church together. We want to sit in the pews and brush up against each other and, and have that conversation. And yeah, so I think we, we need that. I think we, we crave that, that authenticity.

And so I think studying the past, connecting with the stories of our past, it doesn't even have to be church history's past, right? It could be your own family's past. There is something. Very powerful about the real theme. For some reason that made me think about that song. Nothing Like The Real Thing. You know, that song?

I'm not gonna sing it, but No, I, I agree. And, and you can't fabricate. The feeling. So you can't, you can't get that, like you said, from a photograph or an AI image. Okay? I wanna, you can't, and you, and I'm saying you can't fake the spirit, right? When the spirit is real, when the spirit is testifying of truth, there it is deep and you know that.

Mm-hmm. And it, and, and the spirit working is, is maybe the same thing as tears. But sometimes it's not right. There's lots of things that can impersonate the spirit, but when you know it's the real thing, it goes so deep. I completely agree. Yes. I wanna make sure that we get to talk about this. So, okay. You said you almost fainted when you learned that the church had acquired the Kirtland Temple.

And I, I love something that you said about these saints that, that lived in Kirtland, you said, I think about the enthusiasm they had when they built Kirtland. You have a bunch of people. Some of them are a little bit older, they're a little more established. They're storekeepers, they have some cash, but you also have a lot of young kids who have no idea what they're doing.

They've [00:32:00] never built a house, let alone a house of the Lord. I walk into any of our sites really in Kirtland, especially in the Temple, and I can see how little they actually knew, and I can see the enthusiasm with which they went and did it. It's literally in the floorboards, and that was on the Follow Him podcast.

I love this. Imagining somebody that has such a love for Kirtland learning that the church has finally gotten the Kirtland temple, and so I wondered if you could kind of take us back to that when you learned about it, but also prior to this acquisition, you said you'd only been in the Kirtland Temple as a visitor, which you had been in.

In Cleveland you had visited. Mm-hmm. And, and by visitor we mean that the, the Kirtland Temple was previously owned by the community of Christ Church, but I imagine that you have been able to spend some significant time in the Kirtland Temple now. So why would you say that this moment? I know it was significant for you, but why should it be significant for all of us?

Yeah. So I, I've been attending and visiting the Kirtland Temple for 20 years, and I know the people that were charged with preserving. That building, sharing its story. And some of those people were, some of my mentors. I love them and I am so grateful for all of the work that they did to protect that place.

So part of the, the physical shock of when I was told that, um, the, the properties were being transferred to the church was really, uh, thinking about my friends. And these people that had loved that building and still loved that building. And part of that shock was for me that the realization that the stewardship of this place was now falling on us.

Right. And falling on me [00:34:00] in, in particular. So, so it's, it's a heavy responsibility and it, but also what a tremendous blessing. To be involved in it, why it matters so much has everything to do with our understanding of the temple. We could not do temple work. We could not be sealed. We could not do any of the work for our ancestors if it wasn't for the keys that were restored in the Kirtland temple.

If the, yeah, I mean the church that we live in today would be. A very different organization if it wasn't for the Kirtland Temple. So when I, at any temple that I attend, anytime I do family history work, anytime the, the priesthood is in action is possible because of that temple. Um, so without it, I, I don't think our church would really even exist because what's the point?

Of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. If you don't have the opportunity to be sealed, you know, if you don't get to return to the celestial kingdom, what's the point? Right? Yeah. Has it been neat to be able to kind of dig in deeper to that building? It has been surreal. Let's, I think that might be the best word for it.

The, the first day I was out there just shortly after the acquisition with a bunch of, of my colleagues who also know and love that building, that moment when I physically hold the key to the temple in my hand like that, that's. That there's no words to describe that feeling. Yeah. So in the last, what, almost year and a half since the acquisition happened, I, I can't even tell you how many times I've been back [00:36:00] in Kirtland studying that building, and similarly at the sites in Navu studying those because all that happened at, at the same time.

It's been incredible. We we're just starting the process of learning the history of, of those buildings, you know, the, the, the folks that were in charge of it have been stewards of those buildings for over a century. They know them inside and out, and I'm just learning which Floorboards Creek. And which door sticks when it rains, you know?

And, and so I imagine I'm gonna need 20 years to get up to speed fully on those buildings. But what a tremendous opportunity. And it's been fun also to see the way that, uh, people visiting them now. Um, have already been blessed and changed by it. You know, that there is for any, anybody who visits, there's a power being able to stand in that place.

I was there just, um, a couple weeks ago with, with a group who had never been to Ohio and some of them just cried. Being able to stand there and feel the kind of holiness in that building, it's so. Yeah, it's such a tremendous thing that's happened. Well, I love, I've noticed as you've been talking, Emily, that the way that you talk about places is kind of the way that some of us would talk about people.

Mm-hmm. Like getting to know someone, um, spending time. Learning the things that make that person unique, and I love that that's the way that you approach these, these places and, and see it as such an an opportunity. You said referring to Navu, that you feel like you really don't know someone until you've been in their home.

I thought that was interesting because when Spencer McBride was on this podcast, he said something similar [00:38:00] about like, you really don't know someone until you've read their mail. And that's obviously 'cause that's what he's been doing with the Joseph Smith papers. But what do people's homes tell you about them?

And do you have any specific examples of how working to preserve these people's homes has helped you understand them better? Yeah, so I'll say most people don't leave behind a record like a paper, right? Most people are are, you know, don't have an archive or a, you know, haven't published widely, right? But everybody leaves behind a structure.

It is either a place that they lived or a place that they've worked in, or a place that they've helped build. And so it's fun to see the invisible people through the places that, that they lived. The person that comes to mind, I feel like I've, I have now been in like every home Brigham Young ever lived in.

And it's been, and I'll say, and growing up Brigham Young was hard for me. He's, there's, he's a har, you know, Brigham is a mess. He's, he's hard, he's hard for me to understand him. He seems, he's complicated, I think, and I think Brigham and is complicated for a lot of people. Yes. And then I spent a lot of time in his houses.

Wandering the beehive and lion houses in Salt Lake, working on wandering his house in St. George, and we're currently working on his house in Navu. And my perspective of Brigham Young has changed by being in his home. He's still complicated and messy and I don't fully understand him, but I. I see in Brigham YA desire to be better, and I see in him, uh, striving [00:40:00] for improvement and I see in Brigham failure and mistakes, but I also see the, the attempt of repentance and picking up and trying again.

And trying to follow the voice of God. And, and I don't know if I would've had that same kind of experience if I hadn't spent so much time in his houses over the years. I knew I was spending way too much time in the beehive house when I could, when I started dreaming about it, and I could walk the house in my dreams.

But, and I think the same thing. It's not just about Brigham Young, right? It's about the other people that lived with him. You know that being in that house, the beehive house, and thinking about the way that that place would've influenced so many other people, the thought that Eliza R. Snow lived across the hall from Zina Diha, Huntington Young.

And so you, I I, I think I would love to be a fly on the wall in their conversations when Eliza is coming back from a speaking tour somewhere and Zina is coming back from a suffrage meeting trying to help women receive the right to vote. And I would love to just sit in the parlor with them as they are discussing their day.

Yeah. And so I think there's, you need, and I also think about, you know, those of us today that. Some of us are very careful about who we invite in our homes. Mm-hmm. And who gets into our personal space. And so for me, there's some, there's some people I know that if they say, will you come over to my, my house?

I know that I'm being trusted with something very personal with them. Right. So I, you know, I, yeah. I learned, I learned so much about people from when I'm actually invited into their home. Can I ask a follow up question? Yes. So those things that you mentioned, learning about Brigham [00:42:00] Young and the way that that has kind of changed your perspective.

Mm-hmm. How do you learn those things from being in his house? Like what does that look like? Yeah. Um, I just, well you spent a lot of time, again, you go back to the archive, you read all about it, but really there's just, when you, it sounds kind of odd, but being able to walk through and imagine him there, one of my.

Favorite stories of Brigham Young and like I, when I used to give tours to vi house, sometimes I would, I would talk about it. There was one particular day where Brigham was in the, kind of the backyard near the stables and he saw one of the stable hands put his saddle in the dirt. And if you work with horses and that kind of equipment you, that is a no, you do not.

Put a saddle in the dirt and Brigham sees this happen and starts yelling at this, at this stable hand in mid-sentence. As the story goes, Brigham stops, turns and runs from the backyard into the house, and his little daughter follows him because she's cute and little. And Brigham goes into his bedroom and slams the door.

And his daughter pushes her ear up against the door and she can hear her father yelling at himself on your knees. Brigham on your knees, meaning get down and pray. You can't treat people like that, and I like to imagine I can almost then visualize Brigham in his house, in his private space, calling himself to repentance for treating someone poorly.

And I can walk the house the same way, right? I can start in that backyard and I can run through the house with him and slam that door and be in that bedroom with him as he is praying. And then I can think about all of us, right? All of us probably have those moments where our temper gets [00:44:00] the best of us, and we have to go into our room and slam that door shut.

And force ourselves to pray. Yeah. Get over it. Yeah. And I don't know if I would have that same appreciation of that story without the house. Right. I need to be able to slam the door. That's so neat. Thank you for sharing that. Okay, so you've said that the future of church history sites is exciting.

Obviously in 2030 we'll have the anniversary of the organization of the church. I wondered what are some of the things that you're most excited for in your work in the next five years or so, and do you have a dream project? I, my dream project is whatever I'm working on right now. No. Um, that's fun.

That's, that's fun. No, um, there's lots of wonderful things happening. So you have all the major anniversaries of the church coming up in the next decade that are gonna be, I mean. So, so wonderful. How do you tell those stories? A project that just wrapped up that I, I will never stop talking about is the restoration of a meeting house in Ogden, Utah that was built for the deaf community in 1915, and it's one of the first buildings in the Western United States designed by the deaf.

So it's a really wonderful story about. Uh, yeah, just about hope for the future and, and this, this kind of accessibility issue. So I'm, I'm really excited for that. The, the church is involved in all kinds of efforts to improve access to historic sites and, you know, making, removing the barriers to make it difficult for people to, to visit them.

Mm-hmm. I'm really excited about the work that's happening at the Beehive house right now. We're in the middle of restoring those homes, the beehive and lion houses, to talk not only about Brigham, but about the women who lived there and sharing their [00:46:00] experiences. And we're going to share the story of Joseph F.

Smith receiving section 1 38 of the Doctrine and Covenants in that home and talk about Revelation in the 20th century. I'm really excited about the possibilities for how do we tell the story of a global faith moving forward. Church history didn't just happen in the 1830s and the 1840s. Church history is happening right now and a lot of the, the major places of growth and the major places where we have an opportunity to share that story are places outside the United States.

That, I mean, that's exciting to be able to find, uh, the waters of Mormon locations, right? To find the Susquehanna rivers and the Kirtlands and Navu of Brazil and of Nigeria, right? And helping larva saints all over the world connect with the stories, not only of the church has passed, but their own local past.

You know, that. The, the, the possibility of local historic sites that you could visit the first baptismal site in, in Carabas. How cool is that going to be? Cool. Yeah. That was so cool. Yeah. I think just this week somebody was asking me about my family history and they were like, are your, I assume your parents are converts.

I'm from North Carolina. They were like, I assume they joined, joined the church, or you had family from out here. And I was like, no, they. My ancestors joined the church in North Carolina and they never left. And so on one side, I'm sixth generation LDS, and I'm the other fifth. And this man's eyes were just like, what?

And I think it's neat to think about and honor the people that. Gave us this gift of the gospel of Jesus Christ and, and one of the [00:48:00] most beautiful ways I think that we can honor that history is by, like we've talked about throughout this conversation, visiting those places and feeling the spirit that's associated.

So I love the idea of people all over the world getting to have better access to. Their own history within the church. So, tangent on that quick there, there. Yes. The history of the church in the South is fascinating that there's a, a whole group of, you know, in early 19 hundreds, so 19, oh, like about 1901 to about 1915 mm-hmm.

Missionaries go out to these little tiny towns and baptize maybe two or three families, and then they build a little branch at a crossroads. Then there's a little cemetery built next to it, and then there's picnic tables out back. Right. And the, the, the south, the, the church in the south has its roots and those little tiny branches built at the turn of the century.

And some of those branches stayed branches and some of them became wards. And then stakes. Some of those early churches that built in like 1905 are still there. Yeah. And local people. I, yeah. The, I mean, and that story is replicated everywhere, right? Right. The little, little branch. Yeah. And that story is worth sharing, right.

You know, to be a fifth generation latterday saint from North Carolina. It is very cool. Yeah. My, my grandma, uh, my, the first woman that joined the church in my family missionaries knocked on her door. Mm-hmm. Her husband didn't want her to talk to them. They gave her a book of Mormon. She read it. And she loved Alma so much that she said no matter if her baby was a boy or a girl, she was gonna name the baby Alma.

And she did, she named her daughter Alma. Um, and that was in, she joined the church in 1911. So I just, I, I appreciate, I don't know. I [00:50:00] just, I appreciate the gospel in my life and I, I know that there are people all over the world that feel the same way. Emily, my last question for you is, what does it mean to you to be all in the gospel of Jesus Christ?

I feel like we've been talking about that for the last 45 minutes. Yes. I think all in for me is loving God. And then by extension, loving his children. And so when I say that I, I strive to love God above all else, that means that I am going to do the hard thing. I'm going to stick with the gospel, stick with the church through all the hard things, and find ways to then extend that love.

For everyone. I want everyone around me to know that they are loved, that God loves them, and that he wants them to return home to be with him. So for me, being all in is how, what can I do to help? How can I facilitate that? Because he has extended his love to me and so I, I'd better help somebody else do it too.

That's all in. Thank you so much, Emily. It has been so, so, so good to talk to you and thank you so much for sharing your experiences and your testimony with us. It's been good to be here.

We are so grateful to Emily Utt for joining us on today's episode. As always, we're so grateful to you for spending your very valuable time with us, and we're also grateful to our sound guy, Derek Campbell of Mixed at six studios for his help with this episode. Thank you so much for listening and we'll look forward to being with you again next week.