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Sharing the Gospel with Family History

For the past month, Glo has been deeply involved in compiling the information for her family tree, because as a mission, California Santa Rosa is trying to use family history to make connections with people while sharing the gospel.  The idea is that pretty much everyone wants to know where they come from (hence all the genealogy TV shows, and the fact that genealogy is the second greatest use of the internet...after pornography....), and by showing people the Family Search app, they will be more inclined to let the missionaries into their home.  It's kinda brilliant and so NOT surprising to me who has always felt the spirit of Elijah in my own life.  Yep, that spirit of Elijah--for me, it's more like a locomotive feeling than a feather ;-)

I think a lot of us have been doing some of the things that the church is putting out right now as "new" for a long time.  For several years, I've been helping people find their ancestors, or I've been finding them for them. I don't think I've recorded either of my specific experiences, so here goes.

I've been going to the same hair salon for over ten years now--Beyond Looks in State College.  Five or six years ago, a new guy started working there, doing all barber work.  Turns out, Eddie Fisher was the fiancé of the owner's daughter (nepotism at its finest!).  I sent Mark to him before his mission, and he and Mark really hit it off.  In fact, Eddie is very open-minded about everything and was more than happy to listen to Mark talk about why he was moving to Russia for two years, and during those two years, he always checked in with me to find out exactly how Mark was doing.  Well somehow, his fiancé-turned-wife, Hailey, found out that I love genealogy, and very soon Eddie approached me about helping him with his.

Someone in his family (his grandfather if I'm remembering correctly) had just died, or was getting really old, and Eddie had a bunch of papers that that man had scribbled notes on about his family.  He sent me photos of all of those notes and asked if I could put things together.  He had heard, through the grapevine, that he had Cherokee blood, and knowing what I know now, I should have told him right then how I thought this would end, but I'm kinda ruining my story. I just asked him what his grandparents' names were, and I was good to go.  I probably spent two days working on his tree, and ended up going back five generations without any stumbling blocks.

Eddie is pure rural Pennsylvanian.  One side of his family has been in PA for at least seven generations, and they have the PA pride of being hunters, and rednecks, and in my mind, close-minded.  In other words, they are VERY white.  Yep, the cornerstones of the native Pennsylvanians we knew ;-). I went up his father's line first, and it was kind of incredible to see those ancestors listed in books of PA settlers.  The land grants given to them from William Penn are detailed, and I even found sketches of original homesteads.

(And ugh, let the shaking of my head commence.  Why the heck is everyone else's genealogy so easy to trace, and mine is so difficult???)

I then went up his mother's line, and it was only four generations back that I found something very suspicious.  Eddie's great-great grandparents as older people were living in PA, but when I went back a few decades on them, I found them in the District of Colombia.  However, they were living within a black community, and I questioned if these were the same people, so for the first time, I actually needed to look at the race question on the census.  In PA, they listed themselves as white, but after getting married in DC, they listed themselves as "M" or mulatto, and as children, they were listed as "B" or black.  In a huge stroke of luck, I found newspaper photos of them, and sure enough, they are very light-skinned black people.  As I know now, many African Americans have the story in their families that they have Cherokee blood, a story that comes from Cherokee tribes in the 1800s owning 7% of the slave population themselves, but most of these stories are unfounded and romantic.  So while I couldn't find the Cherokee line in Eddie's family, I had the news that he instead had African American blood.

I kid you not, I quadruple checked my research.  Delivering such news to a native Pennsylvanian could cause all kinds of emotional stress.  I gave him the news over email, and encouraged him to do the research himself (in case I had made an error), and waited.

The next time I saw him in the hair salon, he and Hailey were over-the-top thrilled with the news!  Yes, thrilled!  They had quickly announced it to the entire salon, and Hailey was giving him all kinds of grief about being a "soul brother" and such (it is interesting--he has curly black hair).  When I said, he is open-minded, I wasn't kidding.  I mean, he plays in a punk rock band.  I figured that was the end of it.

And then DNA tests became en vogue.  They could hardly wait to order a DNA test to see the actual "Sub-Saharan African" wedge of the racial pie on his profile.  I, on the other hand, felt sick.  What if my research was wrong, and they were disappointed?

Thankfully, the DNA test confirmed my findings.  He did indeed descend from African Americans...and not from Native Americans.  I don't know if he did anymore research on his line.  I shared his private tree from Ancestry with him, and I since haven't seen any changes made to it.  It was beautiful though to see him and his wife talking about their lineage with multiple people over the course of a year and seeing their excitement over their findings. #TheSpiritOfElijah

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The other story.  I thought I had already blogged about this, but I guess not.

I have written about my friend at Interlochen, Jay Barclay.  He was my saving grace while working there, always being a kindred spirit when the craziness hit the fan.  One time, we were sitting on the front porch of the infirmary, and he told me a story about his grandparents who had lived their whole lives in Kansas.

As far as I remember, the story went like this:  His grandmother had been put in a nursing home, because she had Alzheimer's, and his grandfather couldn't completely take care of her.  Jay's grandfather would spend everyday with her at the home, and then would go back to their actual home to sleep.  One night, the grandfather woke up around 1 a.m. and saw his wife, standing at the foot of their bed.  She was saying goodbye to him.  He called the nursing home, and she had just died an hour beforehand.  To say I was overwhelmed as he was sharing this story with me would be an understatement.  I wanted to ask him a million questions, and I was also speechless.  And the goosebumps.  So many goosebumps.  Jay had mentioned the grandfather's name because he had inherited his middle name from him.  And I knew the grandfather was living in Kansas.

With not much to do at Interlochen after I returned home from work each afternoon, I decided to try and find his grandparents in records, and it wasn't even difficult.  I found them immediately.  I wondered exactly what their story was, seeing that they had such a profound experience between the two of them.  Within two hours, I had discovered that one of Jay's great-great grandparents was with Sydney Rigdon in Ohio; the ancestor had left his religion, and joined "the Mormons".  It appeared, however, that within two generations, they were no longer practicing members of the church.  But that ancestor was a major player in the religious awakening of the time.

I was so nervous to tell Jay that I had "looked through his underwear drawer" in regards to genealogy.  I mean, how #creeper is that?  And believe me, my hands were shaking when I came armed with my iPad to work and pulled it out over lunch.  I showed him all that I had found....and he never asked me about it again.

I keep both trees on my Ancestry account just in case one of those men ever contacts me about what I told them, or what I found.  Nobody joined the church because of what I did, but I think I had a positive impact on them through family history.  They say that it takes an average of eleven encounters with members of the church for someone to join the church, so if I'm number seven of eleven, or number seventeen of twenty-two, it's all good.  I'm honestly just happy to share what I love doing, and I'm glad to see that the church has finally jumped on board with me ;-)

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