“Find Iby”

After I joined the Church, I was introduced to the exciting work of searching for my kindred dead. What could be more natural than to want to share with them what I now held sacred?

At one point I found myself searching for my mother’s family, the Greenlaws—a family who left Scotland and settled in Maine. My research ultimately brought me to the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) Hall in Washington, D.C., which is not far from my home in Maryland. The decision to look there changed my life—and the lives of several others—forever.

The night before my trip to the DAR Hall, I was waked from a sound sleep by a man’s voice saying gently but insistently, “Find Iby.” He pronounced the name “Eye-bee.” I awoke thinking someone was actually in the room, but since the voice had a calm tone and delivered a nonthreatening message, I wasn’t afraid. I looked, saw no one, and concluded that I had just had a very realistic dream. Twice more that night, however, I awoke with the same voice urging me to “find Iby.”

In the morning, I discussed the unusual experience with my wife, Jeannie. There were no Greenlaws with that name, but after some thought, she recalled that the earliest recorded members of the Johnson family—her father’s line—were Benjamin and Isabell, who was called “Iby.”

I drove to Washington with the Greenlaws on my mind. I knew that the head of the committee that planned the Johnson family reunion each year was a man who, for almost a quarter of a century, had served faithfully as clerk of court for Chatham County, North Carolina. During that time, he had combed all the courthouse records under his dominion for information that might lead to Ben and Iby’s origins and their parents’ names. Each year he had been forced to report that no new information had been found.

Accordingly, I had no illusions that four hours with DAR records 350 miles away from Ben and Iby Johnson’s home could reveal what twenty-five years of research with the original records had failed to find.

Consequently, I spent three and one-half of the allotted four hours in total frustration, looking at records of what seemed to me to be the most prolific family in the early American Northeast. There were many complete Greenlaw families, but none was in my direct line.

Finally, the memory of that gentle voice came once more: “Find Iby.” With reluctance, awed by the monumental futility of the task, I went to the North Carolina section and pulled at random a blue-covered typewritten manuscript from the shelf.

My heart sank when I realized what I held in my hands. The volume was a compilation of early wills on file at the Chatham County courthouse. What could be more useless! The data in that book had been collected from the indexes maintained and reviewed by the head of the Johnson family reunion—my wife’s relative, the clerk of court for Chatham County.

In almost complete frustration, but still with a little half-hopeful prayer, I flipped open the book and stared at the page displayed.

In that moment, several lives were changed forever.

On that page, before my eyes, the typewritten title of a misfiled document declared that what followed was the will of Samuel Gillmore.

Samuel left property to his daughter Isabell, also known as Iby, and to her husband, Benjamin Johnston (not Johnson) of Gulf.

Two little things—a misfiled will and a name change.

I had found Iby. I had found her because someone wanted her found. I had found her because I could help her. I had found her because the work of vicariously performing baptisms and other ordinances for the dead truly is a part of the plan of a loving Heavenly Father who wants us all to return to him.