by Julie Bennion Mertlich
Helen Madsen
I first met Helen Madsen at a Bennion family reunion when I was a teenager. Reluctantly, I had gotten into the car along with my siblings as we drove from Idaho Falls to a stake center somewhere in Taylorsville, Utah. Tables of the cultural hall were covered with family memorabilia, including a bell from the USS Bennion, which was commissioned after Mervyn S. Bennion’s heroic actions during the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Lowell Bennion, author and educator, gave a talk about the Bennion family. Then a soft-spoken woman took the microphone. She explained the contents of the bulging manilla folder we were all to take home—family group sheets and pedigree charts, genealogy. I took one with Helen Madsen’s name stamped in the upper left-hand corner. I was 17, starting my senior year in high school, filled with thoughts far-removed from the dreaded word genealogy.
I graduated from high school then went on to college. Eventually I got my degree, married and began a family, but those seemingly innocuous manilla envelopes found their way into cardboard boxes every time I moved. As life marched on, I learned that a book was to be written about the life of my second great grandfather and 1847 pioneer, Samuel Bennion. Years passed and the book was not forthcoming. By then I had become engaged with family history. I have always kept a journal, and my patriarchal blessing reads, “You will be able to search out the names of deceased ancestors and put them in their proper family relationships and have their work done in the temple. I promise you that you will be successful in genealogy and find many, many of your family’s names that were thought to be lost. This will bring you great joy.” I have inherited from my Nana Lorilla Horne Bennion her dolls, her traveling case, a coat, silver pitchers, and other serving pieces. I know how to take care of them in acid free boxes. When I saw notices in the “Bennion Family Recorder,” I donated money to the writing of the Samuel Bennion book, thinking that it would be good to have one for Samuel as well as what we have for John.
But the book wasn’t forthcoming. After many years, the spirit worked on me and I started asking questions. I felt prompted to contact the Bennion family’s consummate genealogist, Helen Madsen, and we set up a meeting time. On the appointed day, I found myself on the porch of her home in West Valley, Utah. As she opened the screen door, she looked like she could have stepped out of the Hawarden (pronounced, Harden) Wales Post office. She was diminutive in size, and I recognized her immediately as the soft-spoken women I had seen years ago. I first noticed her sparkling eyes with her gray hair pulled back framing a gentle smile. I introduced myself and asked what I could do to help. With that we began our years-long, mutual journey to complete the Samuel book.
She told me that a room in her basement had been converted for her research. Following this frail woman, worried she might fall, I made my way slowly down the steep linoleum stairs into a catacomb of boxes stacked upon boxes. To say the least, the sight was overwhelming to me as an amateur genealogist. Walls were covered in maps and diagrams. Every flat surface, including the floor underneath every table, was stacked with files or boxes. Dust covered everything. There was hardly any place to sit except for Helen’s chair at her computer. Several rolls of yellowed paper the size of butcher paper but lighter in weight were rolled upright in a corner, covered with handwritten family names. The only closet door was open with reams of paper likely from the last office supply store sale. Helen found me a metal chair and her story unfolded like another scroll. I was mesmerized.
Helen had traveled to Hawarden, Wales, several times gathering information for the work, diligently keeping records of people she met and detailed notes of significant locations. Returning home, she followed up on her new discoveries, waking early before her six children woke. She pursued interesting facts and researched stories of the life of the ancestors she loved so much. In 2011 she emailed me:
Somewhere in my teens I realized that there always seemed to be an “aunt” in each family who “did all the genealogy” and I determined that I would NOT be that aunt. And that was my thinking through my teenage years. It was not until the 1970’s when a series of events happened to sort of change my thinking. Circumstances occurred that frustrated me greatly. Uncle Ira had a Bennion Family meeting at his home. I remember Jerry Bennion was there, myself and Uncle Ira. One thing that really bothered me was that there had been books written about the two Bennion brother’s but no one knew anything about the sisters. In my youth I had occasionally wondered if I still had relatives walking around on the other side of the world. As a result of that meeting, and my determination to see what happened to the sisters, my desire to not be THAT aunt seemed to disappear and I concentrated on doing genealogy. I found I didn’t really know how. After frustrating attempts the opportunity for a scholarship at BYU Salt Lake in genealogy appeared. I took it and went nights and studied at 5:00 in the morning while the children were still sleeping. It took me about 10 years to obtain the degree.
She started this work before computers, back before genealogy was correlated when each person had their own nine-by-fifteen-inch Book of Remembrance with hand-written entries. Eventually the Personal Ancestral File (PAF) program came along, with every person asked to add four generations of their family to the record in the Church genealogy library. News stories came of a very large storage facility being built in Cottonwood Canyon where millions of records would be stored in a temperature-controlled environment. The progression continued from floppy disks to RAM, but Helen was never intimidated. Instead, she adapted to all these innovations, even thrived with them. She embraced the far-reaching computer and the power of its capacity. Later, a summer project was scanning all of Helen’s records—it accounted for more than a terabyte of information.
Still, many obstacles arose. She fell off her treadmill and got a black eye and she got pneumonia. After a flood in the basement of her home and due to her advancing age, she moved in with her son Ron near the South Jorden temple. Helen’s family had moved her genealogical material, including boxes of papers and her terabyte of electronic files, into Ron’s basement and a small bedroom just off the entrance. I sat on a three-legged stool while Helen worked at her PC; the work was slow gathering the necessary information for the Samuel book.
As I continued to visit her, I could see that age and energy was beginning to take its toll. Two hours was about as long as I could be there, but that length of time was also the limit of her stamina—when she tired and her voice became raspy and dry. Once she fell and hurt her wrist, but insisted that it wouldn’t slow her down. Still, she had slowed down, and searching through the files on her desktop to find her drafts of the Samuel book often took most of our time.
At the close of one of our sessions I asked her what drove her to do this research. She said her Patriarchal Blessing, similar to my own, says that she would be given the blessing of doing genealogy work. I then asked her what blessings she thinks she has received from doing this work? That “genealogy aunt” had a twinkle in her eye, and responded with the joy of knowing that the temple work was done.
When it became clear we needed help, the Bennion Family Organization hired Ron Clifford, but after completing two chapters, he had a heart attack. John S. Bennion, who teaches English at BYU, made contact with one of his former graduate students, Liz Knight, who finished the remaining chapters. Even after that, Helen wanted to go through the book line-by-line on her ancient computer. Every time we made a change the whole program broke down, and we had to call her son, Mark Madsen, for help with getting things running again. Then my husband, Ross Mertlich, became ill with cancer, and I couldn’t spend much time with Helen anymore.
In the meantime, John E. Bennion, president of the Bennion Family Association, went on a mission, and the family organization went into cold storage. Recently it has been revived, and the board of the Association authorized money to finish the book. John S. Bennion and Katherine Richards have helped me get the book ready for printing—editing the text and laying it out with pictures.
Gorden B. Hinckley said, “Be true to who you are and the family name that you bear.” No one lived that more fully than Helen Madsen. Through the years when I left her house after one of our sessions, I felt like I’d been on sacred ground. She spent her life getting this book ready. Often it felt like unseen others were there. Despite the challenges and roadblocks, I know God helped move this work along. As a people, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints do what we can with genealogy, but we are helped along the way. I feel that Samuel, Mary, Rhoda, and Helen are all happy that this book is finally coming out.