Nauvoo on the Road in Hannibal, MO

Friday was our preparation day, affectionately knows as P-day, which Sister Christensen pointed out does not stand for play day.  We cleaned the house, grocery shopped, visited the John Taylor house and the Brigham Young house, and rested up for Saturday.

6:30 A.M. Saturday we met at the Nauvoo of the Road trailer and van.  4 senior missionary couples drove down to Hannibal, MO to participate in the Folk Life Festival.   This is the last NOR for the year.

Nauvoo on the Road is my favorite thing we have done so far.   Only FM missionaries do it. I like it because we get to talk to people who are not members of the church.  Most of the visitors to Nauvoo are church members. We don't talk directly about our beliefs unless they ask.  Instead we invite them to Nauvoo ,invite them to write their personal history, and to go on Family Search. I like hearing their family stories, which they very readily tell us.

We had 600 visitors to our booth.  We offered a variety of activities - and nothing for sale.
 The wind blew vociferously at times.  Our "Where are your ancestors from?" map blew down and broke, so we couldn't use it.  This map was such an attention getter last week, but the genealogy fan chart worked almost as well. In the picture below notice the display pictures blown down on the table.
 We've observed that people either enthusiastically admit that they are very interested in their family history, or are adamantly not interested, thank you very much.  I can't say what percentage are interested, because we really only talked to people who approached the table.  This group kept us quite busy most of the time.  The beauty of the map is that we could pull some of the more reluctant ones over, so it was a great help last week when we were at a smaller festival.  Hannibal's festival is near enough to St. Louis and Quincy to draw a large crowd.

Keeping the chart from blowing away. 

Explaining the fan chart to a visitor

One visitor thought his family was descended from one of the James brothers, Jesse or Frank.  He knew a lot about Jesse James, but hadn't documented the connection.  He was very happy to learn about Family Search and start researching.

Dee cutting off this boy's rope.
The boy declared he wanted to make another one.

The Princess of Hannibal folk life festival is
making a rope.

Pioneer children's games

These girls were determined to finish the braided
weaving. Their mother called them away
before they were able to. 

Our booth sat at the end of the road,
about a 100 yards from the levee, which
seemed to have a leak. 

So we went to explore just how much trouble we'd
be in if the levee gave way. 

The river is actually quite a ways away.  That
is a park between the waters, but you
can't get to it right now.  The road to it is
under water.

WRAL has been sending me flooding alerts annoyingly often.  I know the river is high, very high, but I think we're OK unless one of the many dams breaks. I may just delete WRAL off of my phone.