Finishing a Dream

This is the story in a tiny nutshell....

Many years ago when my Dad and Mom were married they lived in Koenigsberg, East Prussia, Germany. Dad was the Branch and District President at the time when the dangers of war became evident to all those who lived in this north eastern part of Germany. Dad was drafted into the army and the members of the church started to flee their home and move to safer places of refuse towards the western half of the country including my mother who at this time already had two young boys. At one point before the members all scattered my father made a promise to the members of the church that they would all be together again. Little did they know that the gathering time might just have to be on the other side.

After the war my parents again had that deep desire to come to Zion where there was a temple. They had so much family history that had survived the war that they felt an urgency to do the work. There were no Temples in Europe at that time. So after my parents and family one of his surviving counselors in the branch presidency, Brother Bollbach and his family had all immigrated to the USA they met in Salt Lake City and had a long discussion of how they could possibly guarantee of a possible reunion even if it were to be on the other side. So Dad and Brother Bollbach contacted the General Authorities to see what they could do. I do not know the details but Dad (Fritz) and Fritz (Bolbach) and my mom and Ellie (Sister Bollbach) got permission to do this work. So they gathered together all the membership records and organized these records in a systematic way of checking to see if any of the temple or endowment work for those who were baptized during their lifetime in the church could be done. The temple work for many of these members, and as things have changed a bit we were able to complete work as well for their spouses and parents. The project grew and grew. We were doing really well with the work and kind of caught up with it spiritually before Mom passed away. It became a slower process because we always had to wait 110 year from the members birthday. As I looked through the file and we have 150 or so cards that still need to be done or rather checked out. And thanks for Jonathan wanting to have some names for baptism I am working on these names again and using his help and I think he getting an appreciation on this sweet work. One thing that is really becoming a joy is when I come across one of these names and all the work has been done by their family who somehow survived the war and either immigrated with their family but the fun ones are the ones who have relatives and they caught th espirit and still live in Germany or other parts of Europe.

I actually have done over 1300 names these past two months in the indexing part of Family History for the church and it is becoming easier for me to read the old record. Unfortunately I tried to do some German files and I have an extreme difficulty in reading those records. I have a testimony why we need to do this and put it on the computer... I know I can read the letters on the computer and so can people all over the world.

We hope we make Oma and Opa happy that we are again working to finish their family history Koenigsberger Branch and District temple project. Dad was the one who rallied everyone to do their Family History. Mom was the silent hard working partner who did the majority of the paper work, typing the old fashioned way, researching, organizing, and preparing the work to be done in an orderly fashion. We just neeed to finish it and keep working on our own family too.

Just a small number of the members.
Don't know if any of these people are in the member cards Jon and I are working on, but the picture gives the work some real life feeling. These were real people and many did not survive WWII. We are trying to find any connections. In all cases the time is right to do the temple work.