An inspired walk
My husband, Ratu Tevita Logavatu, was to leave for further studies at BYU-Hawaii in June and only had two months more at home. My four children and I were to follow when school let out in December, as I was then teaching at the LDS Primary School in Suva, Fiji.
Because his maternal grandfather came from the Wallis Islands in the 1800s and died before he was born, my husband had a hard time trying to trace his lineage from that line. His mother's family could not help much, as they did not have much information on that line either. They could only go back as far as their grandparents. Yet he desperately wanted to take the names of his ancestors to the temple in Hawaii.
So it was on this particular Saturday morning he decided to take a walk and look at a new residential site that was being developed about three miles from where we lived.
As he came to the site, which previously was a squatter settlement in Suva, an elderly woman got off the bus in front of him with baskets of vegetables from the market. He offered to help and asked where she lived.
She replied that she lived in a small house near the new residential site, together with others from her homeland on the southwest Pacific island of Futuna in the Wallis Islands.
After they arrived at her house, she offered him a glass of water and asked where he lived. My husband answered and related that his grandfather was from Futuna also. Excited, she asked for his grandfather's name. When he told her, she stared, unable to believe what she had just heard.
His grandfather, she said through tears, was her brother, the first of five children, of which she was the last. He had left home as a Catholic missionary to serve in Fiji and married a Fijian girl. That was the last they had heard of him. She could not contain her joy when she learned that her brother had had three daughters, two sons and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
When my husband got home very late that morning, he had his "Futuna" lineage all set and ready to take to the temple.
I know that he was inspired by the Lord to take that walk that morning to find what he found. - Alanieta Logavatu, Nausori (Fiji) Ward
(Another in a series of "Family History Moments." Illustration by Deseret News artist Reed McGregor.)
