Recognizing President Moz Burles

 

     Working on my personal history, I decided that I would have a section on persons who had important influences on my life, persons that helped me develop values and take positive steps.  Aside from my parents, and especially my mother, I think the most influential person was Moz Burles, the White Salmon Branch President when I was a teenager.  He encouraged me in so many ways, such as when I brought him a tithing check from my summer haying work two years before I was a church-member, having long discussions about the Church and its teachings,  bringing our family Church related books to read, helping me to get baptized, arranging of me to receive the Aaronic Priesthood, giving me priesthood assignments, helping me to be called on a mission, and so forth.  I wrote a three page description of the ways he helped me in my life.
    After I served my mission and was living in Utah, I had very little contact with President Burles.  I knew that he continued to serve in various ways in the white Salmon Branch/Ward and in the community.  At some point I learned that he had lost his wife and in his old age was being cared for by a sister who lived in West Jordan and that he had passed away.  As I was writing about him, I decided to look up his record in FamilySearch.  I found there a fairly sketchy record added by a niece or nephew, that really didn’t do justice to him for his contributions to me personally or his positive influence in the White Salmon community.  I looked for information about him in Ancestry.com and found a nice obituary record that had been published in the White Salmon Enterprise.  I learned that he was buried in, of all places, in the town cemetery in Charleston, Utah, a little community in Heber Valley, which lay along the highway from Provo Canyon just at the top of Deer Creek reservoir.  He was buried by his sister Bessie and her husband, Neil Winterton, in the Winterton family plot in his hometown.  Several weeks ago, Wendy and I were able to locate his grave in that cemetery so far from the people in Washington state that he served and influenced and even from his wife, Valore, who was buried in a cemetery near their home.
    I then added three items to the memories section for President Burles in FamilySearch, that I hope adds to his luster.  First, there was his obituary, second my 3 page tribute to his life, and third a picture of his grave marker in the Charleston Town cemetery: Mozart Choules Burles, KW8L-8H1, born in Provo, UT 11 August 1902, died 2 April 1983 in Salt Lake City, UT