At the dawn of the the 20th-century the missionary force was still largely composed of married men who left behind their families, normally containing young children, and traveled far from their homes to serve as missionaries.
This was the case with Joseph Fielding Smith, or as he was then often known Joseph F. Smith, Jr., who left behind his wife who had just had a miscarriage to go serve as a missionary in the United Kingdom. This was the case with Goege D. Benson, Jr, when he left behind his wife and children in about 1909 to go serve a mission in the United Kingdom. Brother Benson's oldest son was a boy they called T, who would later be known as Ezra Taft Benson.
The modern model of young, single missionaries serving before their marriage had began. On the first day of the 20th century the first marriage ceremony performed in the Salt Lake Temple was the marriage of David O. McKay and Emma Ray Riggs. Brother McKay was a graduate of the University of Utah, who had a few years before served a mission in the United Kingdom (mainly in Scotland).
Joseph F. Smith, Jr's cousin George Albert Smith represented all these trends in his missionary experience in the 1890s. First he had been called as a mutual improvement association missionary. He was sent from his home in Salt Lake City (where he went after completing high school at Brigham Young Academy, although as a child in school he had often put Lucy Woodruff's pig tails in the ink well in their Salt Lake City school.) to southern Utah where he served as a mutual improvement association missionary. At the dawn of the 20th-century Francis M. Lyman was serving as president of the British Mission. None of his wives had accompanied him on this assignment. Before the 20th-centuries first year (1901) was out, Heber J. Grant would open the Japanese mission. He was accompanied on this assignment by one of his two living wives (he had had three at once at one point, but his first wife, Lucy Stringham Grant, whose father was the man for whom Bryan S. Hinckley was named, had died a few years before, not long after the birth of their only son, they had a few daughters, who also died. Elder Grant traveled with his daughters throughout the US to get their minds off their mother dying, and one of his daughters fell ill and nearly died, but was saved by a blessing from George Q. Cannon in which he revoked the power of Satan and his having claimed the life of this child.
Geogre Albert Smith receieved the call to be a Mutual Improvement Association missionary on Sep. 7, 1891. In this capacity he traveled with a friend of his who was a grandson of Brigham Young, thus repeating their grandfather's being co-members of the first presidency. The were called by the first presidency and sent to Juab, Millard, Beaver and Iron counties to build up the mutual programs in those counties. Elder Smith was 21 at the time.
Elder Smith would after a few months return to Salt Lake City, where he married Lucy Woodruff, a daughter of Wilford Woodruff Jr and thus a granddaughter of Wilford Woodruff and his wife Phoebe. Wilford and Phoebe had a daughter Phoebe who was one of the wives of Lorenzo Snow. So Phoebe Woodruff is probably the only woman to have been both mother-in-law and grandmother-in-law of presidents of the Church, sort of a slight difference from Mary Fielding Smith who was the only woman to be both a mother and a grandmother of president of the Church.
George Albert and Lucy were married in the Salt Lake Temple on May 25, 1892. On June 23, 1892 George Albert left on a mission to the southern states, which he would mainly spend as the secretary to President J. Golden Kimball. The position of secretary was not like is found in most modern missions. President Kimball did not have counselors. Elder Smith was thus a cross between a one man pair of assistants to the president, a one man set of counelors to the president, and did many of the things missions secretaries, in modern missions often multiple men and women, do. Do make things more interesting, there were no stakes in the south (actually I think none outside of Arizona, Utah and Idaho, southern Alberta might have just gotten a stake, but even much of the inter-mountain west lacked stakes, Boise would not see a stake until about 1912. That is also the year Nevada got its first stake, although some areas had been part of the St. George Stake before then.)
So with no stakes, the Southern States Mission oversaw all the operations of the Church in the area it covered, which was Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi and maybe Kentcky and Ohio. I am not sure how much of Virginia was in the mission.
After being in the mission from June to Novemeber, Lucy W. Smith came and joined her husband, and stayed with him for the remaining year and a half of his mission.
As the 20th-century progressed thins were beginning to change. When LeGrand Richards went out as a missionary in 1905 at age 19, he was ot yet married. Yet David M. Kennedy in the 1920s left on a mission the day after his married, leaving his wife behind. Hugh Nibley's father served as a mission pesident in the Netherlands as a young, unmarried missionary. Yet he was succeeded by 27-year-old LeGrand Richards, who was now a married man.
With the disruption caused by the World Wars, the Church started to move away a little from the model of relying on American missionaries.
Especially during and right after World War II, Germany saw many local missionaries, and due to migration controls, they became a key part of missionary efforts in places like Tonga by mid-century. In the 1930s LeGrand Richards was one of a large number of married men, mostly former missionaries, sent on short term missions. He had also been called to go to California to serve as a stake president, although this was a slightly different case because he remained gainfully employed.
By 1952 and the close of the Korean War the Church pretty much ceased to send out married men as missionaries unaccompanied by their wives. I am much less sure about the rise of the senior couple missionarires.
I know such missionaries existed by the late 1970s. I have little if any evidence clearly placing their emergence in earlier times.
During the 1950s while David O. McKay was president of the Church, it became standard to call counselors to mission presidents. While Mission presidents served full time and came from elsewhere, their counselors were most often local men called from the area. Local in the sense that they lived there, some were from that area, and some had moved there for work, but they were resident there as opposed to called from elsewhere.
More so than in other cases, these counselors were like Aaron and Hur, able to hold up arms about to drop. They tended to know the area much better than the mission president.
During the first decade of the 20th-century the standard term was "lady missionaries". I think this was still the common term when my grandmother served in the 1940s. I have not found a definitive time of the switch to "sister missionary" as the term, but guess it was never intentional and always gradual.
Ezra Taft Benson is to date the only president of the term whose wife served as a missionary prior to marriage. On the other hand for about half of his mission Sister Flora Amussen had her mother as her companion. Ezra Taft Benson was the first president of the church to hold a master's degree, and the first to have done work on a Ph.D. He is also the one who was most clearly notable for work done outside of being a general authority. He like President Smith was a young unmarried missionary (in Britian with David O. McKay as his mission president), a married missionary leaving behind his wife (in Europe as President of the European Mission just after World War II), and a married mission president with his wife along with him (in this case in the Germany based European Mission, with a house in Frankfurt, that they shared one Christmas at with the Hinckley family.)
To be fair, in both his assignments as mission president, Elder Benson was closer to an area president than a mission president. He was both times a member of the Quorum of the 12, both times he presided over all missions in Europe, not any specific mission. The first was in the days just after World War II. The second was in the mid-1960s when the long standing US military agreements with countries such as Italy and placment of US servicemen there were bearing fruit in the dedication of the land for the preaching of the gospel. On August 2, 1966 Elder Benson oversaw the reestablishment of the Italian Mission.
Starting in the 1970s two other trends emerge. The Church begins to centralize missionary calls and training. More and more missionaries are called through the formal channels of Salt Lake City, and the local missionary begins to become a thing of the past. Mini-missions, stake missionaries and some other such assignments fill in the force, but formal mission calls come from Salt Lake City.
While missionary training had been centralized in Salt Lake City at the mission home beginning in 1925, this was a one week course, and only applied to centrally called and not mission called missionaries. In the 1960s visa problems lead to a formal language training curriculum. The Language Traning Mission begins at BYU, and later spreads to Ricks (now BYU-Idaho) and the Church College of Hawaii (now BYU-Hawaii).
In 1976 the whole operation is recentralized, both mission home and LTMs, as the MTC in Provo, Utah. In 1977 however a missionary training center was opened in Brazil. Over the years more MTCs outside the US opened, they trained missionaries from those areas of the World, and generally had no language training, just missionary gospel teaching training.
Things begin to change again in the 1990s. It was determined that new missionaries could often be better trained for their new assignments on sight. It also made the logistics of arrivial to the mission more simple.
So beginning with the Brazil MTC, missionaries foriegn to Brazil joined native Brazilians in being trained. By 2000 the Madrid Spain MTC joined with an initial plan where missionaries from the US would spend the first half of traning at the Provo MTC, and second half at the Madrid MTC.
At some point, and I don't know when this happened, the process became even more focused on evening out use of facilities. Thus at some point missionaries heading to Russia, no matter where they came from, begin training in Spain.
The first decade of the 21st-century saw "raise the bar" and Preach My Gospel. Missionary work was moved from being an expected rite of passage to being a work emphasized on teaching. A higher expectation of worthiness and contrite repentence was imposed, as well as more stringent health requirements. Programs were developed for service missions for those unable to be regular full time missionaries.
The 2010s saw lots of new developments. The most seminal was the 2012 age change for missionaries. This facilitated a one year creaton of over 50 new missions. It was connected with many more sister missionaries, the mission council replacing the zone leaders council, the mission president's companion (wife, but we are trying to find a clearer title) was made a formal member of the mission council. The position of coordinating sister was created.
Along with this, missionaries called Spanish-speaking from the US were normally sent to train at the Mexico City MTC. No new MTCs were created, but several existing ones were greatly expanded.
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