Gems of Reminiscence: Seventeenth Book of the Faith Promoting Series, Designed for the Instruction and Encouragement of Young Latter-day Saints
Religion
Gems of Reminiscence: Seventeenth Book of the Faith Promoting Series, Designed for the Instruction and Encouragement of Young Latter-day Saints
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints -- Missions
"I am the man for you to see," he said promptly. I was struck with his
words. Except that they were in the first person, they were the same
that my invisible monitor had many times repeated to me during the
preceding hour, an hour of impatient chafing on my part. As he spoke
he turned on his heel and without another word walked to a desk some
distance away, opened and took from it two sheets of foolscap paper.
With these sheets of paper in his hands he walked back to where I stood
and proceeded to tell me that he had been desiring to know more about
his ancestors, that he had traced his fathers' line back to the first
settler of the name in New Jersey, that he had arranged the pedigree in
the form of a "broadside," (which was the old fashioned form for such a
record), that he had made two copies of this "broadside," which he held
in his hands as he spoke, and that I was welcome to one of them. So
saying he handed me one of the sheets, to my great surprise and delight.
We conversed a few moments during which I thanked him heartily, and
then I returned to Newark. When I came to examine carefully the record
he had given me, I found it to be of great value to me, or rather to
Sister F--. It embraced her trunk line of ancestry as well as his own.
In fact, they were near cousins. I spent two or three weeks in the
surrogate's office making abstracts of wills left on record by members
of this Williams family, which was very numerous, and collecting other
data; and the pedigree given me by the marble cutter, which contained
some 200 names and six or seven generations, was of great aid to me
in establishing proper connections. I was successful in obtaining and
connecting many hundreds of names of this family, although I was slow
and awkward at the work.
How came the marble cutter to make a duplicate of his record? The only
answer that I can give is this: So that a copy might be in readiness to
give to me for use in the house of the Lord.
Some years later I had another experience of a similar character but
even more striking. I had been employed to complete the genealogy of a
Chamberlain family, of New Jersey. In the court house in the town of
Freehold in that state is an extensive collection of land, probate and
other records dating prior to the Revolution, and rich in genealogical
data. I went to Freehold to search these records for Chamberlain
material, and expected to reap a harvest, as previous searches had made
me familiar with the collection of records there.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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