Today we traveled to the small town of Szklana, Poland to participate in the dedication of an Evangelical cemetery there. A priest from the Catholic Church along with an Evangelical Pastor blessed the cemetery in an impressive ceremony. This cemetery, which was unmarked and had no visible gravestones or markers, was the final resting place of people who lived there and belonged to the Evangelical church around 1900.
We were invited there because an interested grade-school teacher and her principal decided to rally community support to locate and honor this cemetery. They spoke to the few living people who knew it existed and then when they needed to know the names of the people buried there they called our FamilySearch Center in Gdańsk. Using FamilySearch sources, our Sister Karen Hales Parkinson helped them find the names of people interred in this cemetery.
So we had three religions coming together to honor people, long dead, in an almost forgotten cemetery in Poland.
Because of Sister Parkinson’s help, they rolled our the red carpet for us. We were given the front row seats and repeatedly honored. They gave full credit to FamilySearch and to the Church ofJesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Mom was not always comfortable with being VIP’s and yet not understanding a word of the ceremony. You just nod and smile!
