Family History Moment: Following Spiritual Promptings
Contributed By Norene Thomas, Church News contributor
The Holy Ghost can guide us as we do family history work.
Article Highlights
- After following a prompting, Norene helped someone find an ancestor.
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I worked at the family history center in Mesa, Arizona. One day that I was scheduled to work, I took off because I was helping three other women prepare a lunch for a good friend whose son had died. We took the lunch over to their home, but we did not stay. Even though I had taken the day off, I felt a real need to go to the family history center. I ate a small lunch while standing up, and then I went to the center.
Claudelle L’Equyer, a member of our stake, was there with another leader and a group of young Beehive girls from Tucson. She said they had been to the Tempe Arizona Stake Center that morning, and they had let the girls work on the computers. Then they decided to go to the family history center in Mesa. I mentioned to Sister L’Equyer how wonderful it was to have the 1880 census on the computers and how it even had an index. She said that she had been looking for a Kirkendall line, but she did not know how it fit in. She had hit a brick wall. While the other leader was working with the girls, I suggested that we look at the 1880 census record.
Sister L’Equyer said that her grandfather was born in 1877, but she could not find him in the state where she thought he was living. I suggested that we look for him in the index. I checked the census record in a different state than the one where she thought he was. We discovered that he was living with his grandparents who were the Kirkendalls. We could hardly believe our eyes. She thanked me many times for finding out who the Kirkendalls are. She and her husband went back to that state, and they found many more records of family members.
I told her the circumstances of the day and how I felt a real need to go to the family history center in Mesa. We both knew that it was inspiration. My husband was a dentist who died in 1992. The L’Equyers were patients of my husband. Sister L’Equuyer said that she thinks my husband, Brother Thomas, was helping too.
This year I completed 15 years of working at the Mesa Family History Center, which is now known as the Mesa Family History Library. It has been such a pleasure to work with patrons and to help them find their ancestors.
—Norene Thomas is from the Alameda Ward, Tempe Arizona Stake.
