By B. F. Cummings.

AT SOLICITATION OF SAINTS IN UTAH, ENGAGED IN GENEALOGICAL RESEARCH WHILE SERVING AS A MISSIONARY—TAKES A SPECIAL MISSION FOR SUCH WORK—IMPRESSION THAT HE WAS RECEIVING HELP FROM THE SPIRIT WORLD—SEARCH FOR WILLIAMS' GENEALOGIES—A SIGN AND A MUTUAL IMPRESSION—VALUABLE DATA OBTAINED FROM A STRANGER, WHO WAS EVIDENTLY INSPIRED—RESEARCH OF CHAMBERLAIN FAMILY RECORD HELPED BY A STRANGER WHO WAS ALSO EVIDENTLY INSPIRED TO DO SO—VALUABLE RECORDS PROVIDENTIALLY FOUND IN UNEXPECTED PLACE.

When I was twenty years of age I went on a mission to New England, and was laboring there when the St. George Temple was dedicated. The completion and dedication of this sacred structure greatly stimulated among the Latter-day Saints in the Stakes of Zion a desire to procure records necessary for Temple work, and a number of brethren and sisters, who had migrated from New England to Utah, wrote to me and asked me to procure genealogical data for them.

I was kept too busy at missionary work to do very much record searching, but I complied with such requests in a number of instances, and soon came to feel an intense interest in genealogical work, a sentiment that influenced my course of life for many years, and still remains with me.

I returned from this mission in September, 1877, and soon after reaching my home, which was in Salt Lake City, I had a conversation with Elder Wilford Woodruff, who was then one of the Twelve Apostles, in which I told him that I felt that it was my duty to return to New England for the purpose of procuring genealogies for such of the Saints as might desire to employ me in that work. He approved my sentiments, and introduced me to President John Taylor, who likewise approved them. At the April conference, 1878, I was set apart by Elder Orson Pratt to go on a mission to New England and the Eastern states to preach the Gospel to the living, but more especially to procure the records of the dead kindred of Latter-day Saints. I was profoundly impressed by the blessing Elder Pratt gave me.

Immediately after conference I started on this mission, and was soon engrossed with my labors in the interest of the dead, labors that consumed much of my time for many years. Although I was but a youth of limited education and at the outset of my genealogical work was almost totally ignorant of those branches of knowledge that are commonly considered absolutely essential to success in such work, such as local history, local laws and usages, systems of records in towns, cities and states, etc. I often met with a degree of success which surprised me.

Many a time I was made to believe that I was receiving assistance from the other side of the veil, and my faith to this effect has always been unshaken; and it is my present purpose to relate a few incidents that tended to create this faith within me.

One of the first genealogies I undertook to trace on this mission was that of a Williams family. An aged widow named Sister F—employed me to trace it, and the data she gave me to start from pointed to Newark, N. J. as the place in and near which her Williams kindred had lived, and thither I went. At this time I was an utter novice at such work, with not a soul to teach me the first lesson in it. I made my way to the surrogate's office and told the clerk in charge that I desired to trace the genealogy of the Williams family of Newark and vicinity. He replied to the effect that I had a big job on my hands, and advised me to call on Judge Jesse Williams of Orange, a town a few miles from Newark, who, he said, could probably give me some information. Accordingly I took a car to Orange and soon found myself near the center of that town. The clerk had given me directions for finding Judge Williams' residence, and I started to go to it. I soon came to a marble yard which had a sign extending over the sidewalk. The sign gave the name of the proprietor. It was Williams. Something seemed to say to me: "This man belongs to the family you are tracing, and you had better speak with him."

A lady customer was selecting a gravestone, and the proprietor of the marble yard was walking about with her, directing her attention first to one monument and then to another, apparently in an effort to suit both her taste and her purse. As it would have been impolite to interrupt them, I waited. The lady could not decide. It was getting late in the afternoon and I was uneasy at losing time. Mr. Williams had not noticed me, and I decided to go on to Judge Williams' residence. But something seemed to say to me: "This is the man you want to see." But," I argued with myself, "the clerk in the surrogate's office advised me to see Judge Williams, and the clerk is likely to know whom I had better see." For about an hour this debate continued in my mind. The lady was about that long in choosing a stone and I chafed at the loss of time. Again and again I started to leave the marble yard, but each time came the same prompting: "This is the man for you to see; do not leave until you have talked with him."

Yielding to my unseen adviser, I waited. When the lady had selected a stone, Mr. Williams approached me and asked what he could do for me. I told him I desired to trace the genealogy of the Williams family of that vicinity, and seeing that his name was Williams I had thought he might give me some information.

"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.

A walk of a few minutes took me from the depot to the court house, and I spoke to no person on the way, nor did I see any person who, so far as I knew, had ever seen me before. Ascending the steps of the court house, an old fashioned structure, I entered a wide corridor or hall, I turned into the first room on my left, which was a rather small office, across which extended a counter, through which was a gate or passage way. Behind the counter was a clerk, a young man, to whom I handed my card, with the remark that I desired to search the oldest land records. He told me to pass through the gate in the counter and go into the room next to his office through a door which he indicated. In this door way I paused a few seconds to survey the room I was about to enter. It was about 25 by 40 feet in size, had a high ceiling, and its four walls were lined with iron shelves on which lay the massive volumes of land records.

I stood thus not more than two or three seconds when a gentleman, who had been writing at a standing desk near the center of the room, looked at me and then stepped quickly towards me. At the same time I moved towards him. When he was near enough to me to speak to me he asked me, in a pleasant but abrupt manner: "What family are you tracing?" His question surprised me, and I wondered how he knew I was tracing any family. Most persons searching the records in that room did so for data affecting land titles, and at that moment several lawyers and lawyers' clerks were so engaged. I promptly answered his question by saying simply: "The Chamberlain family." "Well, here is a branch of it," and with these words he handed me half a sheet of legal cap paper on which was written, in ink that was still quite wet, a pedigree giving several generations of a branch of the Chamberlain family, and showing a migration of part of this branch from New Jersey to Pennsylvania, thus establishing an important connection.

As I received the sheet of paper from his hand, the gentleman quickly turned and walked away from me without saying another word, or giving me time to do so, and left the building. I was greatly astonished at the incident. I do not believe I had been in the building more than one minute by the watch when the sheet of paper was placed in my hand. I had not spoken to a soul in the building except the clerk in the front office, and he could not have spoken to any one without my hearing him; and so far as I had reason to believe, not a soul in the building ever saw me, or heard of me, or knew my business. Some years had elapsed since I had been in the town.

The gentleman who gave me the pedigree was about 40 years old, of medium height, light complexion, had a full, round, smoothly-shaven face, and wore a pleasant expression of countenance. After he had left the room I asked a gentleman who he was. The gentleman believed he was a lawyer, but did not give me his name. I never saw him nor heard of him again. While I was on the train en route to the town he was working on that pedigree, and he completed it at the same moment at which I entered the land record room. But why he spoke to me as he did, and why he gave me the pedigree, are questions that cannot, in my opinion be answered without reference to agencies or influences that operate from behind the veil.

I knew that in colonial days a law required marriage licenses to be issued and a record kept of all marriages in the jurisdiction of which Freehold was the seat, and that the books containing these records ought to be in the court house. But diligent inquiry of clerks and officials failed to bring these books to light. I had spent several days searching land and probate records, and was very anxious to examine these marriage records, because I knew they would yield a large amount of valuable data concerning the family I was tracing; but in deep disappointment I gave up all hope of finding them. Preparatory to leaving the court house for good, I went into a small room in the center of the lower floor of the building, which had no outside window and was very dimly lighted, for the purpose of washing my hands, as there was a wash bowl and towel there.

While thus engaged I cast my eyes around the room. On a shelf near the floor I saw three ancient looking volumes, and in the dim light read on the back of one of them the title: "Marriage Record." With the eagerness of a hawk pouncing on a chicken I pounced on those three books. On removing the thick and ancient dust that covered them, I discovered that they all bore the same title. I took them into a better lighted room and examined them, and to by great joy found that they contained records of marriages covering a long period of time. They were the books for which I had been making earnest inquiry among the clerks and officials of the court house, none of whom had ever seen or heard of them. I, a stranger had discovered them in an out-of-the-way place where they had been stored years and years before.

I found in them the rich material I wanted, between 200 and 300 Chamberlain marriages. But I should have left Freehold without this precious data had not my glance, in the little dimly-lighted room, been directed just as it was.

Genealogical work was never profitable to me financially, but I always took great delight in it, and often had experiences which convinced me that a marvelous providence attended me while so engaged.