Posted by:
ExMoBandB
(
)
Date: May 03, 2015 04:51PM
My ancestors were Dr.Willard Richards. He was First Counselor to JS, and was with him when he died. He was among the first settlers in Salt Lake Valley, had prime land in what is now Downtown SLC. He was official church historian, and founded the Deseret News. He was a polygamist. His first wife died in childbirth, crossing the plains, and his second wife, the younger sister to the first wife, raised all the children. When Willard died, Brigham Young confiscated all of the land, that Willard's second wife now owned, and forced her and her children to live on some useless swamp land, near Willard Bay. The widow's son, my ancestor, became a doctor, and quit Mormonism. I wish our family had followed in his footsteps, but his wife was a fanatic, and the Mormon curse continued.
On the other side of the family, my other ancestor was Newell Knight, Joseph Smith's neighbor. His claim to fame was that his wagon was borrowed by JS to carry the golden plates from the Hill Cumorah to JS's house. You can imagine how I laugh when Mormons try to say that there were no "Golden Plates," meaning, there was no pretense of having any Golden Plates. This side of the family were not polygamists. Newell's son was Joseph Knight. When he died, he left his widow a very nice covered wagon and a set of healthy oxen, which she and her children were going to cross the plains in, along with the other Mormons. JS said that a woman without a man couldn't make the journey, so he forced her to give her wagon and oxen to the church--her only possessions. She and her children lived IN A CAVE at winter quarters, and it nearly killed them.
Don'cha love the way the Mormons care for widows and children?
These and other equally heart-warming stories were written in the diaries of my ancestors, which I was able to read, before BYU got hold of them. They have vanished. Several cousins have tried to find them in the church archives, and they simple "aren't there."
None of this ever happened....