#52Ancestors - Week 4 FAVORITE PHOTO

This was a fun yet difficult challenge.  How do you pick a favorite photo?  I am using my husband's favorite and one of my favorites.

This is a picture of my grandfather, Henry Hudson Webb, while serving a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the Swiss-Germany mission.  He left a new wife in Utah in October 1928 and returned home in February 1931.  Using Google translate, it appears they are in front of a church building and possibly a church distribution store.  I also need to upload this into FamilySearch and see if I can possibly find out who these other two men are and share it on their pages.  

What's hard to wrap my brain around is this photo is almost 100 years old and yet I knew my grandfather very well.  Which really means that I am getting old and my baby pictures are now considered antiques.

This next one is my husband's favorite and I can see why. This was in 2009.  We were together as a family for the first time in four years.  My oldest son (in the middle) left for a two-year church mission in 2005.  My middle son (on the right) left for his mission in 2007, three weeks before the first returned home.  This photo is at the airport in 2009 when he returned home.  Twenty-one years later it still brings me great joy when on rare occasions we are able to be all together.

  

#52 Ancestors - Week 3 NAMESAKE

 

Week 3 – Namesake

This one took some thought, but I found a couple things. 

Scott’s line –

Elizabeth Geddes – 1799

                George Geddes Lindsay – 1834

                                George Geddes Lindsay – 1871

                                                George Geddes Lindsay III - 1900

                                                                George Geddes Lindsay – 1922

                                                                                George Lindsay – (nephew) around 1975???

I didn’t know that the Geddes was a maiden name.

 

Scott’s middle name is Lindsay which is his mother’s maiden name.  Our youngest son’s middle name is Lindsay.  That son married a Filipino gal.  Her middle name is her mother’s maiden name and the same with her siblings.  That is a Filipino custom – to have the middle name be the mother’s maiden name.  We are encouraging them to do the same with their children. 

 

From my side –

Thomas Ray Burt -1884

                Ray Afton Burt – 1911

                                Ray Afton Burt Jr – 1930 (he only had daughters)

                                                Grandson Bradley Ray – 1988

                                                                Great-granddaughter – Davi Rae – abt 2005

 That was a fun exercise. 

#52Ancestors - Week 2 - Family Legend

Week 2 – Family Legend

These two stories are the ones that are re-told over and over at family gatherings.  I feel it is important to record it here for posterity’s sake.

Hand-made

Almost 40 years ago Scott and I were newlyweds living in Cedar City while Scott attended SUSC. One evening he was baking us a treat – brownies.  He had added the boxed mix, the eggs and the oil to the bowl and started mixing.  I glanced up at him and noticed his hand was deep in the bowl and I asked him what he was doing.  He said:  “It says mix by hand” as he lifted his hand from the bowl, dripping with a chocolate goop.  He was an accountant in training.  He followed instructions.  Literally.

Road Trip

My niece was a new driver (pre-Google maps and everyone having cell phones), so probably 16 years old (about 24 years ago), as she traveled by herself from her home in Lindon, Utah to Taylorsville, Utah, north along a long stretch of I-15 for a drill team/dance competition.  When the evening’s activities finished, she got back in the car and began the trip back home in the dark of night.  She got on the freeway and drove.  And drove.  And drove.  She couldn’t see her exit but figured it would be the next one.  Or the next one.  Finally, scared and confused, she got off the freeway and tearfully pulled into what she hoped would be a safe place at the Wagon Wheel Restaurant in Ft. Bridger, Wyoming.  She had driven for 2 hours east instead of 45 minutes south.  The owners welcomed her in and had her sit in a booth while they called her parents.  Her dad suggested she get back on the freeway and he would meet her somewhere along I-80.  She refused.  She was not about to get in the car and drive.  So while that kind couple watched over her, her mom and dad drove over 2 hours to rescue her and the car and get them all back home safely. 

 

#52 Ancestors - Week 1 - BEGINNINGS

I’m receiving emails once a week beginning this year that gives a theme prompt to write about ancestors in an effort to share with others what we know or what we’ve learned through research.  I started receiving these last year also (and probably other years) but have never followed through.  Here’s hoping 2021 is a new beginning.

Week 1 – Beginnings

“Beginnings” made me wonder about the beginnings of church membership of my ancestors.  Our course of study in church this year is the Doctrine and Covenants and these first couple of weeks have concentrated on the restoration.  I wondered who was my first ancestor to be baptized a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints?  I’ve not started putting church ordinance dates in my RootsMagic database yet so I didn’t have that information readily available.  I did a quick search on FamilySearch and found:

Name                                         Baptism Year

John Burt Sr                              1848

William Clayton                         1837

Caroline Knowles                      1841

Charles Cottrell                         1850

Raphael Henry Cottrell             1850

Charles Layton                          1849

Sarah Ambrosine Crockett        1849

Sarah Rogers                             1849

Some ancestors had baptism dates after they immigrated with the saints to Utah.  Did they come without being a baptized member?  

Caroline Knowles

I’m not sure that the baptism date is correct.  It doesn’t quite match up with the dates given in the history Sketch of Life of Caroline Knowles Webb, a Utah Pioneer of 1850 found in Family Search: “In the year 1847 [?], during the gold excitement of California, her father and mother and sister, Sarah, left the East to locate in California.  Caroline, who was then nineteen years old – and her two brothers, Thomas and Henry – became interested in Mormonism, and decided not to go to California, and against their parents wishes, who were very bitter towards Mormonism, Caroline and her brothers joined the church.”

William Clayton

From An Intimate Chronical: The Journals of William Clayton:  "On July 20, 1837, the six members of the first Mormon foreign mission landed in Liverpool amid both economic recession and national excitement; England’s newly-crowned Queen Victoria was preparing to name her cabinet.  The mission went directly thirty miles northwest to Lancashire, the scene of the textile mills which were an early expression of the Industrial Revolution.  The missionaries began preaching in the church of Reverend James Fielding in the large factory town of Preston.” [Footnote: “One of the Mormon missionaries, Joseph Fielding, was a British emigrant who had been invited by his brother, Reverend James Fielding, to return there to preach.  The Reverend cancelled his welcome to the Mormons”.]  “Twenty-three-year-old William Clayton, who lived across the river in the area of Penwortham parish, became an early convert to the new church.  On October 21, 1837, mission leader Heber C. Kimball baptized Clayton in the River Ribble.”

A quick check of the “Memories” on FamilySearch does not give much information concerning the baptism of the others listed above. 

I’m appreciative of my ancestors who joined the new church, immigrated to the United States and Utah and built a foundation upon which my faith would be laid.