LDS Scene

• Church members are playing a key role in establishing the American Family Immigration History Center on Ellis Island, a former immigration station located in Upper New York Bay. During the past five years, Church members have volunteered more than two million hours digitizing Ellis Island records from microfilms of handwritten, faded, and damaged ledgers. When the center is completed at the Ellis Island Immigration Museum, the public will have access to a multimedia database containing 17 million U.S. immigration records, representing about 60 percent of total U.S. immigration. More than 100 million Americans can trace their roots to immigrants who passed through Ellis Island between 1892 and 1954.

• A recording of the works of Latter-day Saint composer Arthur Shepherd (1880–1958) has been released as part of the Brigham Young University–connected Heritage Series on Tantara Records. Called “one of the finest musicians ever to come from the Rocky Mountain region, a man of prodigious talent who moved in the highest circles of American music during the first half of the 20th century,” Arthur Shepherd worked in all major genres except oratorio and opera. The Heritage Series recording includes a quintet for pianoforte and strings, six selected songs, and four piano solos, and it features pianists Grant Johannesen and Rhoda Vaun Young, soprano JoAnn Ottley, and the Abramyan String Quartet.

• A memorial plaque has been placed at the San Francisco house where President Wilford Woodruff died on 2 September 1898. “On this plot of ground, a chosen prophet left this mortal probation, and we are grateful for the life of Wilford Woodruff, a great man of this dispensation of time who had great vision,” said Elder John B. Dickson of the Seventy, President of the North America West Area, at the plaque’s dedication on 25 October 1998. The house is located at 1533 Sutter Street in the Marina District of San Francisco, California.