Heidelberg Family History Day

It was another successful Family History Presentation on 6 February 2010, this time in Heidelberg. We love to visit that city. You may remember we have told you that Elder Howlett served part of his first mission as a young man in Heidelberg which then had a small branch of 20 to 40 members attend each week. He and his companion worked long hours in that area and never had any baptisms. Now, however, there is a large and very strong stake there and we had over 100 people attend this Family History day.
In the previous week we had been very involved in creating 110 special booklets for the members to take home, which would remind them of the things they learned about New FamilySearch, Indexing and how to read the Old German Script. In addition Elder Howlett had to prepare 14 laptop computers to take down there from our office, plus cables, printers and projectors for the use of showing power points.
All classes were taught in German. Four classes were held both in the morning and again in the afternoon. Elder Howlett taught morning and afternoon classes in FamilySearch Indexing and how to read the Old German Script. Other training that was given was a beginning class in New FamilySearch, which was packed each time and was taught by Torsten Kux, a colleague in our office. Also there was an advanced class in New FamilySearch, which was also full each time and was taught by Elder Erwin Dahnkin, a German service missionary here. A second class in Indexing and Old German Script was taught by our assistant director and colleague in our office, Richard Walker, who is an American married to a lovely German sister here. Sister Howlett was kept busy by helping out where she could and taking pictures throughout the day.

The director of the whole day was David Shauperl who works in our office. He was recently released as a High Councilor in the Heidelberg Stake in charge of Family History, but the stake president asked him to please continue being in charge of the whole activity, which he did very well.
David is an amazing man who works very hard in microfilming old documents, books, registers, etc. for the church. He is a native German who speaks English fluently and works long hours at his job. He is also a Cancer survivor. He suffered from an internal cancer which seems to be hereditary since his father and brother have also suffered and survived from it. David has had vigorous sessions of Chemotherapy and Radiation and seems to be doing much better now, much to the relief of his family.
David’s beautiful wife, Susanne Schauperl, is the Stake Young Women’s president and seems to be a very good cook. She prepared the meal for the luncheon that day, for over 100 people. The meal consisted of a delicious Taco soup, French bread, Tortilla chips, grated cheese and sour cream, with drinks, and fresh fruits and pudding for dessert. Here in Germany the noon meal seems to be very important to the Germans and the meal becomes a large social event. It is quite fun to get together and socialize with others as we refresh ourselves.

This was a great day of helping more of the German members learn how to get started in these programs. One brother in Grant’s morning class caught the vision of how important this Indexing program is. These records will be accessible so much faster for anyone once they are put on an index. Also the Spirit of Elijah is so strongly felt by those who do this work. It’s such a great beginning step into doing Genealogy. But this brother was taking the step maybe a little too far when he said we should all stop doing so much new FamilySearch work and all of us focus on doing the Indexing. Then we could get it done so much faster for us all to be able to use it! Well, we don’t agree with him in stopping our research and preparing names for the temple, but we do feel if more people would get involved in Indexing the records, we would have a much larger library of digital names to be found in seconds. Can you tell that we feel this work we are doing here in Germany is very important? We hope we can continue with it when we go home.