October 22, 2017

Tuesday, October 10th was Lloyd's birthday.  He would have been 71 years old this year.  All of the siblings were involved in group texting with Lloyd's family on this first birthday since his passing in June.

As part of our FHC service, one of the Lincoln Square YSA Temple and Family History Consultants, Mary Taggart, came into the center with the request to learn Indexing.  Since her Find-Take-Teach experience will be getting to know more about a family member who was killed in an automobile accident when his family was very young and he was from Michigan, we chose a Michigan Indexing Project for her first batch.

Diane and I spent quite a bit of time working on Johanna Kreutz's request to learn where in Germany her family came from.  Johanna has been our Orthology physician assistant for the past year and has been very helpful with our physical therapy and other health issues, and has kept us going while we have been serving in New York City.  We found that there are many sources and line extensions to immigrant ancestors on her father's side of the family. They all come from different parts of Germany--Bavaria, Prussia, Baden.

Johanna Kreutz, RPA, ATC at Orthology at 1889 Broadway in New York

Wednesday, a Spanish brother came into the FHC indicating that there was a problem with his living sealing information since the temple could not read the bar code on the living ordinance file.  After going up to the temple recorder, we were able to find that a different part of the temple program not only cleared the sealing, but it recorded it.  So we immediately made arrangements to have him sealed to his parents to make the record valid.  He came to the FHC afterward and said he was very grateful to have that ordinance completed.  He had actually planned to have it happen at a future date.

Thursday, October 12 was our 45th Wedding Anniversary.  As part of our temple service, we participated in a sealing session where President David Smith and several of the sister missionaries also participated.  President Bean was the sealer and two of my Dutch families allowed the sisters to experience a whole family together.

One of the patrons who came into the FHC from seeing the sign outside inviting people to come in and "Find Your Ancestors" wanted to see if we could help her find her father's immigration record.  This was the first time I had looked for a passenger list on an airplane.  Amazingly, we did find the record that showed he had come from Brussels, Belgium on a Pan American Airlines flight to New York City.

Afterwards, we went out for dinner at the Sugar Factory on Broadway, a couple of blocks away.  This is a family-oriented restaurant where lots of young families bring their children to celebrate their birthdays.  We shared a hamburger and fries along with a Snickers Milk Shake.  New York prices being what they are, this was a $40.00 meal.

Golden sharing 45th Anniversary meal

Diane about to share the Snickers Milk Shake Specialty

We finished out the week, as well as Sunday afternoon, working on additional findings for Johanna Kreutz as well as putting some of the information together in a lesson plan for her.  We found many Find A Grave Index records for her family in Illinois and especially in St. Louis, Missouri where they stayed for several generations.  I also revamped a lesson plan for Ryan Wood, Elders Quorum President that we had planned to present as a demonstration in Elders Quorum Priesthood Meeting but we had to postpone as he was called last minute to go to New Jersey for the weekend.  With our mission ending soon, some of the plans for presenting FH experiences are being postponed with members having other things going on.

I have been sending microfilms back to FamilySearch Distribution that have been digitized and made browsable. Several microfilms where marked "Spring Street" for a project that Pat Nixon, former FHC Director, and now assistant matron in the Manhattan Temple, had used to transcribe information on deceased Spring Street Church members.  But I did not realize until this week that the films were of the Manhattan Death Records.  FamilySearch had said that if they weren't from them, they were to be given back to donors or they could be destroyed.

I found that these were actually records that FamilySearch had on microfilm and they have been digitized, and even indexed.  When Pat told me why they were transcribing (they had called it indexing), it made a lot of sense.

In the 1960s, Donald Trump purchased the property which, at that time, was vacant since the Spring Street Church had been razed.  In the building of a 42-story Trump International Hotel and Tower, it was discovered that under the church, parishioners had been interred after their deaths.  These graves had to be relocated, which was done in the process.

The college was interested in how these people died, and the ten microfilms of Manhattan Deaths contain death certificates that include these people.  Before Pat left as director, about 100 entries were provided to the college for their project.  Should they wish to continue, these records are now digitized and so I was able to prepare to send these films back to FamilySearch.

On Sunday, as Diane was working with census records on families for Johanna, she said she was interested in finding where they came from.  I told her that I doubted that she would find a specific place in Germany where the people came from in these records.  She reminded me that she had sufficient faith, and had seen and been involved in enough miracles to know that she would be able to get the information and scolded me for shaking her faith.

We continued to work on these research findings, and Monday she found an entry for a great-grandmother of Johanna's in the census, and here was the miracle!  Few times had I seen that census takers had listed a specific place, other than the country of birth.  But here was the entry giving Hanover, Germany.

Besides this, a Find A Grave Index listed Frank Kreutz with an exact birth date in Germany and listed the names of his parents.  When doing a search in the historical records of FamilySearch, it brought up a Roman Catholic Baptism record for Franziscus Kreuts in Boppard, Rhineland, Germany.  The exciting thing was that the dates of birth matched!  And baptisms were also found for six siblings.

On Tuesday, we went to Harlem for a doctor's appointment for my annual checkup and a follow-up for Diane.  While there, Diane had her hair cut at the Dominican Star on Lenox Street where she had gone a couple of times before.  We grabbed a bite at McDonald's and I noticed that a truck was pulled along the side street and a vendor had set up a vegetable and fruit stand.  Since we see this quite a bit in these neighborhoods, I decided to take a photo.

On Wednesday, Diane had an appointment for consultation with Dr. Patrick O'Leary who is a spinal surgeon, also a member of the Manhattan 1st Ward. He gave her all the reports from results of total body scan and the copies of the x-rays and MRI she had provided.  He said that surgery was not indicated and that after we get home, to look for a specialist that uses combination of pain management and physical therapy.  We found that Johanna's office was exactly that and we have been under her care this entire year.

While serving in the FHC, Sr. Luz Enith Garcia came in for a second time for help with her late husband's temple work.  He died in 2014 in El Salvadore and had only been baptized.  However, when he died, and ever since, his death information was never reported to membership department.  So without the death information, his ordinances can't be completed and Sr. Garcia sealed to him.  With help from the temple recorder and FamilySearch support, we need to get the death certificate to have it added to the membership.  We will continue with that next week.

This afternoon we met with Johanna Kreutz in our apartment to guide her through her family history experience and what we had found.  We spent three hours together teaching her how to navigate and search in FamilySearch.org and the historical records and had her attach sources and merge duplicates that extended and branched her family tree.  She was amazed at how much time we had spent and how organized the information was.  Pedigree charts and copies of the records were put together to help her see the extent of what we had found as to where here ancestral families came from in Germany.  At the time, she also said that it was much more than she had expected and felt connection to her family as she went through the Kreutz findings.

On Friday, I had an appointment with Johanna for my last injection in my knee. When I got there, before she did anything she gave me a card to say thank your for all that we did on the family search project.

At the same time, I reached over and pulled out the gift and card that I had for her. She smiled and asked me "Is that the Book of Mormon?" I said "Yes, it is and if you read it you will have a greater feeling that what she was feeling at that time but it would be the Spirit telling her of the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon." She said that she was feeling something that she could not put into words and I explained to her that it was the Spirit of Elijah revealing to her the eternal nature of the family.

Then she had many questions about the Book of Mormon so I told her that we had marked the first scripture to start with in Moroni 10:4-6 and then she could read it however she wanted to. I suggested that she read with the focus on our Savior Jesus Christ and try underlining anything that was about the Savior. She said that she was so excited to read it and asked where to begin. It didn't matter, I gave her some of my favorite sections in 3 Nephi and Moroni but she could just start at the beginning. The Spirit was wonderful in her office and we talked for about 45 minutes before getting down to business on my office visit. It was a wonderful experience. She will be moving out to the west to Los Angeles, California in January, so she thought that we would be able to visit each other much easier. I really feel that some day, she will become a member of the church.