About

To discover some of our past, Susie and Gene Clark went back east in October 1986, and Bob and Opal Stenquist joined them there for a cousins’ reunion. Then in 1996 Diana and I, along with Patty and Amos Dana, visited the places where our parents grew up. These trips were inspirational, and the work of piecing together our family history has been enlightening and fulfilling.

My research for this project over the past year has involved collecting stories from family members, perusing diaries and private journals, looking through family photo albums, listening to audio recordings of family gatherings, viewing video recordings, reading letters between our father and mother, and studying genealogical sources.

From all this, we have learned more about how our parents chose one another as life partners. We learned about the events that formed our parents’ outlook on life and their dreams and ambitions. As a result, we are able to look critically at the genesis of their behaviors, which we lived with as children growing up.

Not surprisingly, learning more about them has allowed me to see them and myself more clearly. As the principal author and researcher on this project, I’ve learned much about how I may have acquired my own attitudes and behavior. It helps immensely to be able to see our parents as people; as ordinary human beings trying to do their very best with what life handed to them.

This website provides you, a member of the Lentz or Stenquist family, with access to the stories and images of our past. This family history project begins in the middle of the 19th century with ancestors from Sweden and Germany, and it takes us up to the middle of the 20th century with the start of the Lentz family of Halcyon.

It is our hope (Patty, Susie and yours truly) that this project will enable you (our children, grandchildren and close relatives) to find a meaningful place for yourself within our family’s story, during these times of great societal conflict and change. We hope you will be inspired to continue the story – and make it your story.

Richard Lentz

About The Temple of the People

The Temple of the People (The Temple) is an important part of our family history. Both our parents had family members who believed in the ideas of The Temple. Their lives were influenced greatly by these utopian thinkers.

The Temple was started by a group of followers of a belief system known as Theosophy, and ardent students of the literary works of Russian psychic Helena Blavatsky. The Temple was formed in Syracuse, New York in 1898. Their teachings were (still are) an attempt to fuse basic tenets of all religions with science and art. They sought a place where they could practice their beliefs and live in harmony with each other and attempt to be a model community for others to emulate. In 1903 they moved their headquarters to Halcyon. They bought a farm from Mr. Coffee Rice. There is more about The Temple in Chapter Eight.