For the Church, which has sometimes been regarded with suspicion among the African-American community, it was bridge building. An Oakland newspaper reported that Betty Stevenson had searched for years for her family's past and run into nothing but dead ends, now the journey had a bright new beginning. What she found was family pride. The phones ring off the hook with 50 or 60 calls a day. One illiterate woman called to ask if someone could sit by her and help her find her family.
People write in and say they have had dreams.
The depositors of the Freedman Bank were former slaves-men and women who had little education, little money, and little anticipation of what the future would ultimately yield. A patron works in one of the more than 3,500 family history centers operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Epilogue Darius Gray says everyone of those 484,000 are people who matter to him. Feeling their pain and their loss, he looks forward to a time when their temple work can be done. But just as personal is the slaveholder whose name goes unmentioned.