Having been invited to visit an elderly, distant relative whom I'd met through family history research, I was hesitant at first to go. As time passed, her promise to give me her years of accumulated research became too strong to resist. I decided to go. So, in September of 1992, I set out on a research trip to the Greenville area of South Carolina.
My feelings of trepidation were dismissed in the priesthood blessing my husband gave me, in which I was told that things were being prepared to allow me to find information on ancestors whom I was not even expecting to research.The verity of this blessing was confirmed on the trip as I had car problems about 1 1/2 hours away from home. Determined to exercise faith, I made the 30-minute drive from where the problems began to my mother-in-law's house. There, my nephew repaired the car, and off I went again.
At my relative's house in Pendleton, S.C., I was blessed to receive the lovingly accumulated research of some 30 years. While there I also found an old, out-of-print book that she owned concerning her husband's family. It contained some familiar names. I had not brought my information on that family with me, so I telephoned home for my husband to call it up on the computer to verify. This was needed data, more than 200 pages worth, along with footnotes citing easily verifiable sources for each family.
When I went to photocopy those pages, a repairman was present. He let me make copies at no cost so he could diagnose problems with the machine. I came away with a stack of photocopied pages almost 1 inch thick.
Later, I mistakenly went a day early to the library in Greenville to meet a man I had been corresponding with. As I talked with another man sitting next to me, I discovered that his wife and I have a common line. Later, I was presented with some 325 pages of information he had researched, including
sources. When I did meet the man I had previously arranged to see, he gave me some 85 family group sheets on our common line!
After a week I returned home with what turned out to be some 2,000 names of people whom I had not gone to South Carolina to research. I felt I had fulfilled the mission I went to perform. - Lorna Morton Hibbs, Gadsden Ward, Birmingham Alabama Stake
