Immediately after conference I started on this mission, and was soon engrossed with my labors in the interest of the dead, labors that consumed much of my time for many years. Although I was but a youth of limited education and at the outset of my genealogical work was almost totally ignorant of those branches of knowledge that are commonly considered absolutely essential to success in such work, such as local history, local laws and usages, systems of records in towns, cities and states, etc. I often met with a degree of success which surprised me.
Many a time I was made to believe that I was receiving assistance from the other side of the veil, and my faith to this effect has always been unshaken; and it is my present purpose to relate a few incidents that tended to create this faith within me.
One of the first genealogies I undertook to trace on this mission was that of a Williams family. An aged widow named Sister F—employed me to trace it, and the data she gave me to start from pointed to Newark, N. J. as the place in and near which her Williams kindred had lived, and thither I went. At this time I was an utter novice at such work, with not a soul to teach me the first lesson in it. I made my way to the surrogate's office and told the clerk in charge that I desired to trace the genealogy of the Williams family of Newark and vicinity. He replied to the effect that I had a big job on my hands, and advised me to call on Judge Jesse Williams of Orange, a town a few miles from Newark, who, he said, could probably give me some information. Accordingly I took a car to Orange and soon found myself near the center of that town. The clerk had given me directions for finding Judge Williams' residence, and I started to go to it. I soon came to a marble yard which had a sign extending over the sidewalk. The sign gave the name of the proprietor. It was Williams. Something seemed to say to me: "This man belongs to the family you are tracing, and you had better speak with him."
A lady customer was selecting a gravestone, and the proprietor of the marble yard was walking about with her, directing her attention first to one monument and then to another, apparently in an effort to suit both her taste and her purse. As it would have been impolite to interrupt them, I waited. The lady could not decide. It was getting late in the afternoon and I was uneasy at losing time. Mr. Williams had not noticed me, and I decided to go on to Judge Williams' residence. But something seemed to say to me: "This is the man you want to see." But," I argued with myself, "the clerk in the surrogate's office advised me to see Judge Williams, and the clerk is likely to know whom I had better see." For about an hour this debate continued in my mind. The lady was about that long in choosing a stone and I chafed at the loss of time. Again and again I started to leave the marble yard, but each time came the same prompting: "This is the man for you to see; do not leave until you have talked with him."
Yielding to my unseen adviser, I waited. When the lady had selected a stone, Mr. Williams approached me and asked what he could do for me. I told him I desired to trace the genealogy of the Williams family of that vicinity, and seeing that his name was Williams I had thought he might give me some information.
"I am the man for you to see," he said promptly. I was struck with his words. Except that they were in the first person, they were the same that my invisible monitor had many times repeated to me during the preceding hour, an hour of impatient chafing on my part. As he spoke he turned on his heel and without another word walked to a desk some distance away, opened and took from it two sheets of foolscap paper. With these sheets of paper in his hands he walked back to where I stood and proceeded to tell me that he had been desiring to know more about his ancestors, that he had traced his fathers' line back to the first settler of the name in New Jersey, that he had arranged the pedigree in the form of a "broadside," (which was the old fashioned form for such a record), that he had made two copies of this "broadside," which he held in his hands as he spoke, and that I was welcome to one of them. So saying he handed me one of the sheets, to my great surprise and delight.
We conversed a few moments during which I thanked him heartily, and then I returned to Newark. When I came to examine carefully the record he had given me, I found it to be of great value to me, or rather to Sister F—. It embraced her trunk line of ancestry as well as his own. In fact, they were near cousins. I spent two or three weeks in the surrogate's office making abstracts of wills left on record by members of this Williams family, which was very numerous, and collecting other data; and the pedigree given me by the marble cutter, which contained some 200 names and six or seven generations, was of great aid to me in establishing proper connections. I was successful in obtaining and connecting many hundreds of names of this family, although I was slow and awkward at the work.
How came the marble cutter to make a duplicate of his record? The only answer that I can give is this: So that a copy might be in readiness to give to me for use in the house of the Lord.
Some years later I had another experience of a similar character but even more striking. I had been employed to complete the genealogy of a Chamberlain family, of New Jersey. In the court house in the town of Freehold in that state is an extensive collection of land, probate and other records dating prior to the Revolution, and rich in genealogical data. I went to Freehold to search these records for Chamberlain material, and expected to reap a harvest, as previous searches had made me familiar with the collection of records there.
A walk of a few minutes took me from the depot to the court house, and I spoke to no person on the way, nor did I see any person who, so far as I knew, had ever seen me before. Ascending the steps of the court house, an old fashioned structure, I entered a wide corridor or hall, I turned into the first room on my left, which was a rather small office, across which extended a counter, through which was a gate or passage way. Behind the counter was a clerk, a young man, to whom I handed my card, with the remark that I desired to search the oldest land records. He told me to pass through the gate in the counter and go into the room next to his office through a door which he indicated. In this door way I paused a few seconds to survey the room I was about to enter. It was about 25 by 40 feet in size, had a high ceiling, and its four walls were lined with iron shelves on which lay the massive volumes of land records.