A brief conversation this week about changes in temple practice (not ordinances, in this case, but simply the practical matters of tracking what work has been done, and who is responsible for what in the mission of redeeming the dead) reminded me of my own first temple excursion.
I was 13, a Beehive girl of Susanville, California, and our Mutual chartered a bus to go to Oakland to do baptisms. I don’t remember much about the trip at all – Google tells me that the places are something over 200 miles apart, but I don’t remember what must have been a long bus ride, or even whether we drove there and back the same day or stayed overnight somewhere. No idea.
I remember being in the Temple – the funny white jumpsuits, sitting on a bench waiting my turn, the feel of the wet floor (I’ve never liked being barefoot). I remember the instructions someone gave us to help the man baptizing us – bend your knees when you go under the water, they said, and when you come up, push with your feet and do as much lifting as you can yourself, because the baptizer’s arm gets very sore if he has to lift your full, wet weight out of the water.
I don’t remember what anything looked like. I had left my glasses in the locker with my street clothes. As I was terribly near-sighted, anything beyond arm’s length was a colorful blur, and the bright lights in the ceiling were enormous spinning globes of light, something out of a Van Gogh painting. After my turn in the font, I went back to the locker room, then asked the sister working there if I could put just my head around the corner so that, now wearing my glasses, I could see what the font, with its oxen, looked like. She readily gave permission, but when I tried to do so, our youth leader, Sister Money, was scandalized. She shooed me back into the locker room, and I never saw the baptistry, except later in photographs.
I do remember that I was baptized for 17 women, all of whom seemed to have Germanic or Scandinavian names. It went fast – up, down, up, down – without time to focus on anything or really hear what the baptizer said.
And I remember one other thing.
When I got home, I told my mother that some day, in the next life, I was going to look for Luecke Wehlborg. She wanted to have her baptism done, and she was glad I was there to do it.
I have no memory of anything particular happening when Luecke Wehlborg’s name was read and I went into the water for her. I don’t remember any other name, then or on any subsequent temple trip, except for the women in my own family whose work I have done. But that one name has stayed with me – Luecke Wehlborg.
That conversation last Friday brought her name to mind again, and I suddenly realized – duh – that with the internet, I could confirm my memory (or correct it), and maybe even learn something about this woman.
It took a little tinkering with the search engines, but after a few minutes of clicking through the records for women with more or less the same name under a variety of spellings, there it was. My Luecke Wehlborg:
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I didn’t know what that “Or Barlage” meant – I’m sure it wasn’t on the strip of names I’d been handed after the baptisms – but this was certainly the right woman, because clicking on the “LDS Ordinances” tab brought up this:
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With the dates given in this record, and the name “Barlage,” whatever it meant, I kept searching FamilySearch Family Tree and the trees posted at Ancestry.com, and eventually identified my lady more fully. She was:
Lücke Margaretha Burlage (“ue” is the convention for spelling that sound when you aren’t typing with an umlaut), the daughter of Jürgen Wehlburg sive Burlage and Margaretha Meyer. Apparently her father, born Wehlburg, changed his name to Burlage, the name of the farm he inherited, apparently from his wife’s family, as some of her ancestors are named Burlage.
Lücke lived her whole life in the neighborhood of Badbergen – but that’s in Niedersachsen, not Hannover. She was born there in 1748, married there in 1783 to Johann Ojemann, bore three daughters (Adelheid, Catharina Margaretha, and Anna Lucia) there, and died there in 1818. She lived for 27 years a widow there, Johann having died in 1791.
She was christened and buried from, and presumably worshipped in, the church dedicated to St. Georg, a Lutheran Evangelical church.
You will have noticed some significant differences in the data I’ve presented here as pertaining to my Luecke, but for various reasons I believe this information is more correct than that in FamilySearch.
There is one detail, though, that can only be found in FamilySearch. Well, two, actually. One is the date and place of proxy baptism, confirming my memory of a 13-year-old on her first temple trip.
The second detail is in this duplicate record for the same woman, also found In FamilySearch:
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Luecke’s baptism had been done years earlier. My baptism was an unnecessary duplicated ordinance.
So why did her name stay with me all these years? I don’t know, but I’m still going to look for her one day.
Wow! You do have a memory for names. That’s a blessing to be able to not only do that baptism, even if redundant, but to be able to remember her and share information about her – and to merge a duplicate on Family Search (?)
Your story brought back memories of a temple trip to Oakland from our ward in suburban Seattle!! And I think that was my first. It was either Oakland or Idaho Falls for the closest temple the year after you went to Oakland (I was 15.) We spent a night on the bus going down, had a quick visit to San Francisco, then a night in a dive of a motel in Oakland, temple baptisms, then a visit to the Ocean, and a very long overnight bus-trip home. I don’t remember any of the names for whom I was baptized but they were all listed on a long slip of paper we got to keep but apparently I didn’t.
Interesting story, and frustrating about the duplication.
And it brings up one of my pet peeves–reporting German place names. My understanding is that we report places in the jurisdiction they were in at the time of the event. So I was all set to claim that Hannover was correct because the core of what is now the Land of Niedersachsen was in 1749 the Electorate (later Kingdom) of Hannover. But then, just to make sure, I looked it up and it turns out Badbergen was actually in the Bishopric of Osnabrück in 1749. (Which is interesting in itself because Osnabrück was the only ecclesiatical jurisdiction that alternated between Catholic and Protestant bishops.) Badbergen did not become part of Hannover until 1814 and did not become part of Prussia until 1866.
So it’s hard to get it right. But I, perhaps alone in the English-speaking world, find it fun to identify the correct pre-Germany jurisdiction. I say the correct place would be simply Badbergen, Osnabrück (although I would not begrudge a “Germany” tacked on to the end so people have some idea of where Osnabrück is).
Nice reminiscence, Grant. If your long slip of paper was like mine, it was canary yellow, was punched along both sides to fit a pin printer, and was perhaps 5 inches wide. I still have that one, but it’s buried deep in the closet in a box of personal papers or I would have scanned it to illustrate this post!
Last Lemming, Germany (followed by Italy) presents probably the most complex problem for the point you bring up (we have lesser problems in the US with, say, designating pre-Civil War places that are now in West Virginia). I believe your “ruling” of citing places as they were at the date of the event is the most professional (it points, for instance, to the place where a research should look for documentation). But because so very, very, VERY many people don’t follow that rule, I’ve given up either preaching it or relying on it when I look at other people’s records. You just can’t guess whether someone has followed that rule, or whether his research into what-it-was-then is accurate. So, I generally locate the place on a modern map and, if it’s important to me, research backward to the date I’m interested in. Any other way lies frustration!
This is very interesting. I just looked at the family on FamilySearch Family Tree to see who was doing the genealogical research. I had to go up a few generations then use the Descendancy chart to look back down through the generations, but it is a family from Holland, and someone’s done a lot of work in the German records. Here’s the catalog entry from a family book:
The family was from Holland but a number of lines, including Lücke’s, were from Germany.
Oh, that’s wonderful, Amy! Thank you!
There’s Grant’s strip of names — blue instead of yellow, probably a system check to distinguish male from female. I had forgotten the marks they added. If I recall correctly, they underlined the line as the baptism was done, and added a check mark as the confirmation was done.
Okay, now Grant’s got me wondering what other interesting treasures he has … 🙂
Reading this reminded me of my first temple trip to do baptisms. Unlike Ardis, I don’t remember any particular names. But I do recall a lot of the same visceral details: the funny white jumpsuits, walking around with bare feet, trying hard to comply with the instruction to bend my knees. And, of course, the blindness! I am near-sighted, too, and had to leave my glasses with one of the attendants.
Come to think of it, in addition to the above, as well as the dunking in and out of the water, and the repetitious reading of the baptismal prayers, that first temple trip really makes an impression!
Sounds like the baptism trips that I remember — meet at the church building at midnight, get to the Idaho Falls Temple about 6:00 AM, be baptized 15 or 20 times, then back on the bus home. I don’t remember much beyond the white jumpsuits and the warm water. I think I was too sleep deprived to get much more out of it than that, unfortunately.
I think only in the narrowest possible sense of the word can your service to Lueke be considered “unnecessary.”
I can’t ever remember going to the temple to do baptisms. I wonder if it was even available for youths to do back then.
I remember the first few baptism trips I did. The names were drawn from Catholic South American records – 15+ females each time, all with the first names of “Maria” and often “Maria Ana.” I was under the mistaken impression for quite awhile that you could only be baptized for people with whom you shared the same first name. 😉