Sandra Roth Levenson

I was born in Trenton, New Jersey in the era of the Baby Boomers, attending school in Trenton. I grew up in an area that played a somewhat significant part in the American Revolution and learned a lot about that time period in our nation's history.

My Dad always liked to drive and so he brought us out West for a couple of family vacations. One time we came to Salt Lake to see the Mormon Tabernacle (I found out later that my Grandfather, on my Dad's side, used to listen to the Tabernacle Choir broadcast every Sunday). While touring Temple Square, we got the Joseph Smith's story pamphlet which I started to read on the ride home to Jersey.

The next school year my history teacher handed out assignments to write papers on American religions and I got the Mormons. I wrote to Salt Lake for information and received information back from two Elders. They provided me with a filmstrip and information for my project. They then taught my family about the Church. We had to go to New Brunswick, NJ to be baptized. We attended church in Langhorne, PA. That summer we moved out West. We stopped in American Fork, UT to visit with one of the Elder's family. Elder Greenwood’s Mom said, "Stay here.” She found us a home in their Ward boundaries.

I graduated from American Fork High School in 1964, and then attended BYU. I had a poetry class at BYU where this guy from Boston was also enrolled. I met him at an off-campus dance where he found out we had the same poetry class - small world. Jeff and I were married in 1967. We lived in Provo for a month and moved to Los Angeles. From there we were transferred to Santa Rosa, CA. It was a pleasant area with the reputation of being the allergy capitol of the U.S. because Luther Burbank did a lot of his research there. We spent a year there and when it started raining in November and seemed to rain until April we had had enough and moved back to Utah.

By joining the Church, my family learned about doing genealogy. Remember the Trenton connection to the Revolution? Because of genealogy, we learned that one of our ancestors had been with George Washington when he crossed the Delaware River and surprised the Hessians in Trenton. Much later, while doing a share time in Primary, I was showing how we are connected to the past through our family tree. I found out that the Birches and I have a common ancestor - John Alden.

I have enjoyed doing genealogy, teaching in Primary, serving in Primary and Relief Society and working in the Ward Library for a number of years with some really wonderful people. I have worked on German records extraction and currently am working on indexing, which is a lot of fun. I don't know how many of you remember the old style Ward dinners when several members would return to the kitchen to WASH the dishes. You could really get to know one another over a sink of hot water and tons of dishes!