Goodbye, and HelloWe say goodbye with heartfelt gratitude to Linda and Kurt Christensen, who are relocating to Colorado this month. We thank them for their dedication and tireless support of our FHC and its patrons. We will miss their cheerful and caring dispositions, and their willingness to go to any lengths needed to ensure that our FHC has what it needs to serve our community. We wish them every happiness as they begin a new life closer to family.
And we welcome with enthusiasm our new Director, Ben Mieremet:
Dear Fellow Generation Readers,
With the departure of Linda and Kurt Christensen, Co-Directors of the Washington DC Family History Center, I have been asked to carry on in their stead along with Carol and Gary Petranek and I look forward to the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead. I have served as a FHC consultant and did my share of shift work for many years in helping patrons who visited the Center. Fortunately, I was the lucky one who was able to use my time and the Center’s resources to further my research work in filling out my Family Tree. I was born in The Netherlands during WWII and our family emigrated to Utah in 1948. Almost all my genealogy on both sides of the family is Dutch so my research knowledge has pretty much been limited to that area. But the Dutch kept excellent records and almost all of it has been digitized and made searchable and I have been able to add hundreds of names making for an impressive fan chart. I consider myself lucky and I’m not done yet.
I’m retired now but I worked 37 years for the federal government as a scientist and had a wonderful and exciting career while at the same time doing military duty in the Army Reserve for 37 years (18 in Special Operation Forces and the rest in small intelligence detachments). Just glad PT tests are a thing of the past.
Let me end by wishing everyone a safe and enjoyable month of peace and goodwill. I especially want to thank the dedication of the Christensen’s for their years of selfless service to the cause of genealogical research and wish them a safe journey to Colorado where they can be closer to their posterity.
Richard B. “Ben” Mieremet
