Some Special Colleagues

There are several wonderful people that we have been able to work with quite regularly while serving here in Germany. This blog entry is devoted to some of those special people.
In our office we have worked with three sets of full-time senior missionary couples who have all come from America. Elder Gerald and Sister Eldona Call were here as our first district leaders, if we can call them that. They picked us up from the airport when we arrived, took us shopping for basic food supplies, helped us get situated in our new apartment and even picked us up the first two days and took us to work and back to our apartment. What a great help they were to us. They also helped make us feel welcomed and helped us get started with our training and gave us many excellent suggestions about getting along here in Germany. They are from Portland Oregon area and they have eight children and also many grandchildren. One of their daughters is married to a military officer who is stationed at Kaiserslautern in Southern Germany, so they were able to spend some special time with them and their grandchildren here. It was fun having Elder and Sister Call here, working with them and just having them be our friends. They finished their mission in the middle of December 2009 and when they left, we had to take up several of their responsibilities in addition to ours. We have sorely missed them.

Elder Hank and Sister Wyoma Lund arrived here in our office about 3 weeks after we arrived. They are from Providence, Utah and have five children and several grandchildren. For about 10 months their assignment was similar to ours in that they were working to further the indexing effort. Their assignment differed from ours in minor ways, but we worked together a lot. It was an enjoyable association. One day, my telephone locked in speaker mode at a time when I received a call to inform me that they were going to be transferred to work in the outreach program with the Young Single Adults (YSA). It was thus announced to the whole office all at once. They were grateful that we had all been informed, because they didn’t know how to tell us. They moved from Frankfurt to Würtsburg, but were only there long enough to finally get settled and get acquainted with their new assignment when they were again reassigned to work in the huge Outreach Center in Vienna, Austria. That is the same one where my sister, Elaine, and her husband George Puckett served about twenty years ago. We really missed the Lunds smiling faces and friendship when they left, not to mention that we had to take over some of the work they had been doing and add it to our own workload.

The third missionary couple we have worked with here in our office are Elder George and Sister Launa Herrmann from Centerville, Utah. (Unfortunately they weren’t in the same stake that Jacob was in.) Elder and Sister Herrmann are returning to Germany to serve their third mission here, however this time they are called to work in Church History, instead of Family History, so they don’t work with us directly; they just have an office in our work area where they do some of their work when they are not traveling. It is a new calling and they have to come up with suggestions of how they should do their work, and then get it approved by Salt Lake. They love traveling, so this is a great mission for them since they will be doing a lot of it. Elder and Sister Herrmann have only been here since mid January 2010 and they are living in the apartment that the Calls were living in. In fact it is the same apartment they lived in for their second mission here. It has been fun to get together with them for a couple of Family Home Evening activities and some socials.

The full-time staff members, here in our office are equally important to us. They are wonderful people to work with and very helpful to guide us in our work.

Bengt Svedjot is the director in the FamilySearch Support Office. He is from Sweden and has done many things during his lifetime. He is very well educated and speaks excellent English with an interesting accent. He is married and has two adult children. He and his wife have a house here in Germany about 40 minutes from his work, and also a home in Sweden. Bengt is a man of great spiritual strength, an excellent organizer and director with compassion for his employees, staff and volunteers—like us. He has a ton of natural abilities, but also has learned to work hard and follow direction from the Lord. Bengt succeeded in running the large livestock ranch he inherited, worked with communications issues in the Swedish military and spent several years as the recorder in the Stockholm Temple. When he was asked to take the job of getting the Family History Department in Europe properly organized and running, he was still the recorder for the Stockholm temple and remained so for several months. He succeeded in working out many serious problems and getting the department running smoothly. Now the department has grown and the administrative work has been divided up among several different leaders, but Bengt continues as director of the FamilySearch Support arm of the Family History Department. It is a pleasure to work with him.

Richard Walker is an American citizen living in Germany and is the assistant director here in the FamilySearch Support Office. After having done many different kinds of work and studies, including obtaining a Law Degree, he married a lovely woman from Dresden, Eastern Germany. She served a proselyting mission for the LDS Church in San Bernardino, California. They have two terrific adolescent sons and the family attends the same ward that we do. It has been a pleasure to enjoy several evenings with their family. Richard is an amazing man with natural talents that we usually just dream of having. His memory is amazing, and he has applied his study to a huge range of subjects. He is very gifted with language learning. His store of information regarding the racial history of Europe continually gives us insight into the subtle cultural differences of the people. He can remember names and faces of people he met many years ago, and he continues to update his information about many of them.
Richard is very well read and is also a spiritual man who loves the Lord and working to further the work of the Church here in Germany. With great courage he is able to step into difficult situations and try to work things out. It is through his efforts that we have been scheduled to do so many stake presentations in Family History. We appreciate being able to work with him.

Torsten Kux is a young native German who speaks English very well, but with an interesting Russian accent, because he served his mission in Russia. He also has an ability to learn languages quickly and therefore speaks other languages as well. Torsten is married to a lovely returned missionary and they have two beautiful young children. His work in our office has been as a consultant on issues relating to computers and the Church software programs. He was one of about 20 of the consultants that worked on the highest tier of the support system covering the whole world. Just recently his assignment was changed to one where he works with the training of the Church Service missionaries in Germany, Russia and the Eastern countries of Europe. He has been trained in all the different Family History programs and is an expert in FamilySearch Support. Therefore when we go to stake Family History presentations he is often chosen to lead a class in learning how to use the New FamilySearch program. He especially likes working with the youth and can relate to them very well. He is very enjoyable to work with in the office.

Mariella Schultze is another young native German who works a lot with us to help us with German translations, secretarial and financial problems. She is an assistant to the director of another division, but she has a willingness to help us all. She and her new husband, Stephan, were posted in an earlier blog entry last April 2009 when we were able to take pictures of them coming out of the temple after they were married. Now, a year later, she is serving as an excellent assistant to one of the other managers. We all enjoy her smiling face, and her expertise with the German language, and with financial and mailing problems. She brings a lot of sunshine into our daily lives.

Another of the assistant directors is Patricia Mollemanns. She is also a native German and she grew up in the Berlin area. She served her mission in the Salt Lake Temple Square mission a few years ago and learned to speak excellent American English. Patricia has two beautiful children that she takes care of very well. She has represented our department as a featured speaker at many of the Genealogical conferences we have attended and she has been a great asset to the Church for many years. Patricia has also been a great help to us in many ways and very enjoyable to work with.

During our time volunteering in the Microfilm Operating Center (MOC) we had the opportunity to work with a special young woman named Magnolia Fröhlich. Maggie was working in the MOC when we first started volunteering there back in October and November 2008. She was a whiz at doing the work to get the microfilm orders processed and the microfilms and microfiche sent out to the Family History Centers. We were able to help with some of that processing. Maggie was able to give great training to the new workers in the MOC before she left on her full-time mission to serve in Greece.

One of the special workers that Maggie trained was a young woman name Valerie Sanders. Valerie trained us in doing several additional jobs there at the MOC and is a delightful person to work with. She was previously working as a nanny in Arizona where she learned to speak very good American English. After returning to Germany she was hired to work at the MOC. Valerie is a member of our ward and is serving as a counselor in the Relief Society Presidency there. She has recently received a call to serve as a full-time missionary in the Salt Lake Temple Square mission, starting in July 2010. She will be leaving about the same time we go home.

These are some of the very special people we work with here in Germany and we hope you have enjoyed getting to know a little about them too.