Book with a Past

“Books with a Past” read the sign in front of the store in Concord, Massachusetts.

“Linda, let’s go in and look for that encyclopedia we’ve been trying to find,” I suggested to my ten-year-old daughter.

When the store clerk said they didn’t have one, I decided to browse through the shelves. To my amazement, I found The Walcott Book, a family history book published in 1925. My grandmother had owned a book just like it. Over the years, she had stuffed notes and clippings into her copy and had cracked the binding. My Aunt Fran wouldn’t let me take it out of her apartment, so I had carefully copied all the information I needed from it. We made sure the temple work had been done for all the names we had on our direct lines, and then filed the sheets away.

“Let’s find Grammie’s name,” I suggested. But as we opened to the familiar page, my eyes fell not on my mother’s name, but on her Aunt Sonia’s. “Isn’t it silly? They called her ‘a lady of foreign birth.’ Didn’t they want to say she was Russian?”

I had loved my Aunt Sonia, the little I had seen of her. She was a jolly woman with a wonderful accent. Her gentle husband, Uncle Dana, was a linguist who had begun working as an estate manager after he had gone deaf. It was sad that they had never had any children, and I hadn’t even arranged for their sealing in the temple. Was Uncle Dana all alone in the spirit world?

We bought the book and brought it home. Later that evening, as our son was flipping through it, an idea came to me. “I wonder who used to own this book?” I said suddenly.

My son turned to the front of the book. “Dana L. Walcott,” he read. His words electrified me.

Was that Uncle Dana’s signature? How had the book traveled across the country, twenty years after his death, to end up in a used-book store within five miles of my house? Was it just chance that I had walked into that store, or was the Spirit prompting me to do something?

I decided to write to Long Island, New York, for Aunt Sonia’s and Uncle Dana’s marriage record. Not only did I find Uncle Dana’s signature, which was a perfect match with the one in the book, but I also discovered that Aunt Sonia had been divorced from her first husband in Istanbul. With the information from the marriage certificate, combined with the notes I had gathered from the book in Aunt Fran’s apartment containing Sonia’s birth date and place and her Russian parents’ names, we had enough information to do the temple work for Aunt Sonia and Uncle Dana.

But to my surprise, events did not stop there. A year later Aunt Fran passed away. In her little apartment, surrounded by the chaos of estate appraisers and my eager relatives, I gathered every scrap of paper. On a tiny piece was a note that read, “Uncle Dana had a child who died at birth.” It was an electric moment for me once more. I telephoned New York state; birth records were confidential in the 1920s, but we could get the death certificate. In a few weeks we had the information. A baby girl had been born to Aunt Sonia and Uncle Dana. The baby had had spina bifida and had lived for only twenty minutes.

A few months later, in the Washington Temple, I represented Aunt Sonia in the sealing of that unnamed baby to her parents. I felt an intense burning in my bosom unlike anything I had ever experienced; I couldn’t contain my tears. Surely that is why The Walcott Book had traveled across the country.

Illustrated by Paul Mann