My friends Willie, Martin, and Julia Ann

This week was my first week with my new position. Which is the same as my old position.

But my official job title went from being "Paid Intern" to "Researcher." I'm quite surprised that's my job title. It's accurate, at least for now, but my years at college didn't train me to be a researcher but an editor. A lot of students get jobs as research assistants, but I never had such a job. I did some source checking for BYU Studies, but that's about all the research I did outside of class assignments. (Sometimes I feel bad I wasn't an RA or a TA, but then I realize having an internship with BYU Studies, one of the foremost scholarly journals on Mormonism, was a pretty nice experience.)

Despite my lack of formal training, I really like what I'm doing. I get to research a lot of things, including things I've never heard of, and some things are even things that most historians haven't heard.

One story I got to research this week I found fascinating, and though most (or many) Mormon scholars know about it, the general population doesn't. In 1855, twenty-eight Saints, with about as many others, traveling from Australia on board the Julia Ann were shipwrecked when the ship ran into a coral reef west of the Society Islands. Five people drowned, and the rest had to live on a small island for two months, eating turtles and coconuts.

Years ago, I caught an episode of the documentary series I Shouldn't Be Alive in which a family got stranded after hitting a coral reef. As I was reading the story of the Julia Ann, I kept thinking of that episode and the teenager yelling "Reef! Reef!" And then, it turns out, that family was stranded at the exact same atoll that the Julia Ann was! If there was a TV episode about that family, and there are multiple stories about the Willie and Martin handcart companies, I'm surprised the Julia Ann story isn't more popular, especially since everyone seems to enjoy accounts of people being marooned. (That night I had a dream featuring characters from Gilligan's Island.) I think it would be a great movie.

Speaking of the handcart companies, that's another topic I began researching this week, and I will continue it this coming week. We tend to romanticize the Willie and Martin story in Mormondom, but it really was a tragic event, with multiple unfortunate, and unwise, decisions being made. I'm excited to read more about it.

While indexing this week, an unusual news story from 1999 was attached to one of my batches. I had to verify that it wasn't from a fake news publication (you know, the kind that people start sharing on Facebook). But it actually happened!

"A British woman who blew up like a giant balloon when she accidentally fell on a helium gas nozzle was forced to wait two weeks while her body slowly deflated."

That truth is stranger than the fiction dreams I had this week, which included finding an Egyptian mummy in our backyard, having a conversation with Justin Bieber, and sucking the blood out of a raw package of corned beef. (It tasted like Otter Pop, but after I did it I realized how disgusting that was.)