A Special Discovery

In the winter of 1918, at the height of World War I, history's most lethal influenza virus erupted in an army camp in Kansas, moved east with the American troops, then exploded, killing as many as 100 million people worldwide. It killed more people in twenty-four weeks than AIDS has killed in twenty-four years and more in a year than the Black Death killed in a century. In Spring City, PA, a young minister lived with his wife who was expecting their second child, and their son. The minister, Horace Abraham Kauffman, was my grandfather and his young one-year old son was my father. While ministering to ill members of his congregation, the minister himself caught the influenza and died. For his viewing, his body was placed near the front window so that folks could look in the window to see him and not risk spreading the flu to others. After his death, the presiding elder felt that an expectant widow should not live alone so he approached another young minister, N. H. Wolf, and told him that he should marry the widow and help raise her children. N. H. Wolf was one of Horace Kauffman's closest friends. I actually have several letters that the two young ministers had written to each other both before and after Horace Kauffman was married. So N. H. Wolf listened to the presiding elder and married Kauffman's widow. Then they assigned the new couple to the same church and even the same parsonage where my grandmother had lived with her first husband. How difficult all of this must have been for both of them. As it turned out, N. H. Wolf was a special godly man who would become a great father and a special servant of the Lord, spending about 65 years in the ministry. He was a great husband, the only father my dad ever knew, and he was a major influence in my spiritual life. However, years later when Dianne and I were engaged, my grandmother privately shared with us that one never forgets their first love. Over the years I have learned many things about my real grandfather and his heritage. He also was a very special, godly person. He was a schoolteacher before entering the ministry and he is considered to be the founding pastor of our church in Lebanon. In fact, N. H. Wolf began his ministerial training with him at Lebanon. But as I've tried to find out more about H. A. Kauffman, I was missing information about his life from the time of his marriage to his death. Then, this week, my sister discovered a baby album that my grandmother made after my father was born in 1917. It is filled with baby pictures and notes. It has special pictures of his grandparents. But even more importantly, it has pictures of my real grandfather, including those with my dad. These to me are priceless – a real treasure. I think I now know how an adopted child must feel. I wish I could have met my grandfather. There is so much I would like to ask him and share with him. The more I learn, the more I can see myself in both my father and my grandfather. We had so much in common. Now if only I could be the godly man that they both were. But what is so precious to realize is that last February my father finally met his dad and sometime in the near future I will also have that experience myself.