City Manager Al Childress and the Key West City Commission, during the September meeting, commended Sexton Rose Diaz for her service.
Recently the City received a letter from a couple lauding the service Diaz provided. A woman who grew up in Key West is a third generation Conch and the last in her family line. She and her husband contacted Diaz from their home in North Carolina regarding their desire to fix up the family graves and have a headstone placed.
After talking to the couple Diaz went out of her way to help them and when they arrived in Key West she showed them the family plots, put them in touch with a contractor, and located additional family documents required to prove that they were authorized to do upgrades to the sites.
“She spent more than two hours ferreting out old obituaries and records to create the links between what we could show and what we needed to show to prove that Gerry is the person with the right to fix these graves,” the husband Ken MacLeod wrote in the letter.
“That she would put out that much effort on our behalf is the kind of service you dream of receiving, but seldom see,” he wrote. “I understand she has been on the job only a short time, but I witnessed her stopping to talk to families who were putting flowers on graves to get their names and stories, helping obvious tourists by directing them where to park, and answering phone calls and interruptions efficiently while all the time helping us. She is the kind of person that makes the Key West government look good, and I wanted to let you know how well she is doing her job and representing you.”
