I lurve it when I'm contacted with pioneer or closer family history information to go with the genealogy bug I must've inherited from my mother.

Tonight my "find" is that my great great grandmother traveled with the William Snow/Joseph Young Company, leaving Kanesville, Iowa on June 21, 1850. It took them 102 days to make the journey west to Salt Lake City.

She was only ten years old. Because her mother was sickly and my gggrandmother the eldest daughter, she became responsible for the younger siblings.

After her marriage years later to my great great granddad, she died soon after childbirth with her ninth child, when she was only 33 years young. Her infant died soon thereafter.

What is really kind of creepy IMO is that my great great grandfather, in need of someone to care for his large brood of children as he was a full-time provider for them, married the daughter of a polygamist whose plural wife was a younger sister of my great great grandmother. She in turn kept a close eye on her nieces and nephews because he married her step-polygamous daughter. He went on to have ten more children with that woman. He himself, however, was not a polygamist.

He left TSCC in his later years. Although the church history makes no mention of that. It was shared with me by one of my genealogist cousins prior to her passing away in 2008. She being a Jack Mormon, it isn't popular among the active Mormons in the family. They are in denial that he left the church or that he drank alcohol. He had his reasons for the falling out, but we don't know what it was.

His business was very successful. He had a men's fine tailor clothing and haberdashery that he outfitted men for up and down the Northwest corridor from Montana to Idaho, Wyoming, Nevada and Utah on the railroad line. It needed to be. He had 19 children to support. A wife, and his mother from Wales.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 07/23/2019 09:22PM by Amyjo.

I am related to many Mexicans. Many Mexicans are related to me! I can't count all the primos I have! Primos are cousins... I stay in close touch with none of my living cousins, but the veil is thin, and I'm schmoozing a lot with the dead ones.

This is just a tidbit, a bit of an intro to their stories, as first told to me by my tatara abuela, through dreams I've dreamed and messages I've received, along with heavenly texts.

On September 16, 1810, a Roman Catholic priest named Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla rang the bell of the parish church in Dolores, Mexico, and called on the people assembled outside to revolt against the Spanish colonial government. Although Hidalgo’s efforts were not immediately successful, the fervent appeal that he made that day is remembered as the Grito de Dolores (Cry of Dolores), and its anniversary is celebrated as Mexican Independence Day.

The Mexican independence movement was sparked by France’s invasion of Spain in 1808. Suddenly faced with uncertainty about the future of New Spain, some Mexicans agitated for freedom. The Grito de Dolores, which was also understood as a demand for social and racial equality, energized thousands of people to rebel against the ruling class in the name of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Although the insurgency collapsed within a matter of months (with Hidalgo summarily executed), the seeds of revolution had been planted. The cause was subsequently taken up by another priest, José María Morelos y Pavón, who made a formal declaration of independence in 1813 at the Congress of Chilpancingo. Two years later, however, he, too, was captured and killed, and the movement he led dissipated.

According to my tatara abuela, when she appeared to me in a drunken stupor (her, not me!) I learned that her grandfather, a tailor from Hermosillo and an agent of Yaqui Enterprises, S.A.,
had long been harboring plans to free the northern part of what is now called Mexico, but was planning on calling it Yaquiville, or simply El Estado Libre y Soberano de Sonora.

This humble tailor, my cousin, was named Gustavo Gusano Esquincle. He was a man of the people and there were many who would purposely tear, even rent their clothing! so that they could have Gustavo make the necessary repairs. Everybody loved him, and the books that he wrote about wool.

But then not much else happened to him, except that he had kids who grew up to be adults. And they made their way in the world and for the most part, lived until they died. Everything was done with vigor, or as then say in Spanish, vigor.

Then we get to my cousin Ernesto de Pajaro, who was born into abject poverty in Nacozari, Sonora sometime on a Tuesday morning. He had parents, but they were rentals. Things were very tight in those days.

He became important, which was necessary so that I could talk about him. He did things, and also did stuff. And people were proud of the things and stuff that he did. His was a long and glorious life and he died an old man, with one belt AND suspenders!

It's said that in 1874 he met with the first mormon missionaries in Mexico. He was going to take the six lessons but didn't, because at that point there was no Spanish language version of the book of mormon. And while flannel had been invented, the flanalografo was still decades away from being invented. His offer to help translate the BofM into Spanish was seen as a gift from ghawd, but then the admission came forth from him that he was illiterate. It set the lord's work back hours, maybe even days!

He was not the first Mexican baptized into the mormon church, nor the second, or the third, etc. He kept putting it off and eventually just wandered away and was never heard of again until he appeared to me in a dream. The details are dim...hazy...but there was a definite undercurrent of tension, which probably came from the fact that he was in chains, and was being tormented by happy children who were ignoring him, both in English and Spanish. I took this vision to mean that by the grace of ghawd, mormons have a lot of kids.

Mexicans, which is what I am, both through my mother and my father, and their parents, back, back, back through countless generations, so that I don't have to symbolically break the seal on a bottle of Don Cuervo pulque to be entered on the rolls, all have oodles of cousins. Some famous, some not. Some are tall, some are medium height and some are chaparo. Which I believe means that regular doors work fine for 99.9% of the country.

Mexican are overwhelmingly Catholic, including my cousins. The mormon church claims about 1,500,000 members in Mexico. I personally baptized a handful or two. One of them was missing an arm. This was in Cuautla, Morelos. My greenie, Elder Price, was eager to do the baptizing and I can't remember if there was any difficulty in getting the job done.

I may have just told my greenie to have the guy crouch down and then to just push his head and shoulders under water, just belly flop on him! It made sense to me! He would have been 100% beneath the surface for an instant, just like the earth during its baptism by chorros de agua, and that's what counts, right?

The last Mexican census had 314,932 Mexicanos respond that they were mormons. Was our one-armed convert among them? I don't know. And it just occurred to me! I never personally did a single baptism! Yay!

My last senior and I converted two young ladies whom he used to dance with, and he baptized them in Lake Chapala, along with their mother, whom I used to dance with! (No, I just stood by the door, drinking Sangria Señorial, one after another, until it midnight struck.) We rented a car in Guadalajara and made a very nice picnic day out of it. Did anyone in the mission home know? Not a chance!!

None of the people whom I helped teach the gospel have ever appeared to me in a dream, or as ghosts or spirits. I am trying to be mature about this fact and not see it as a negative in my life. I think that it was my new contact lenses. It took me about two years to get used to them. I would constantly blink furiously and my eyes would leak. I bought the contacts, and was fitted for them in Mexico City, but I was then transferred, on April fools' day, to Guadalajara. The contacts were mailed to the mission home and the APs brought them up, with a note from the optometrist: "Put one in each eye every morning; remove at night." But in Spanish...

I also let my hair grow out. I did this because of a series of dreams I had about beach balls. They weren't happy beach balls. Eventually, I was handed a note from the MP. It said to cut my hair. I asked one of the APs, the shorter one, how much to cut. He said it had to clear the top of my shirt. So I did.

Over the years I kind of took it personally that only a handful of my dear departed relatives have appeared to me in dreams. They have uniformly told me in these dreams that they have messages they COULD give me but that they won't pass them on because it is agreed in the great beyond that I'm kind of a putz. The word I'm getting is that I have not yet tasted of death because it has not been settled with whom I am to bunk.

Apparently, there are rules about newbies having to be taken under the wing and no one as yet has signed up for this. I'm told that the sign-up list for Britney Spears is LOOONNNNGGGG!! So if you're old and you're wondering why you're still here, it could be that nobody wants to have you bunk with them for however long it takes to get you adjusted to 'the other side.'

Please rest assured that as I receive further light and knowledge regarding the past, the present or the future, I will pass it along, lest you all waste away.

Thank you.

"Everything was done with vigor, or as then say in Spanish, vigor."

A few days ago Birdman coined the phrase "charlatans with their quivering lips." I thought that was very possibly the best quip I had ever encountered on RfM. I must admit, however, that your sentence is a close second.

We walk among giants.

I like the phrase charlatans with quivering hips. They ain't nothing but hound dogs who hound you with gods.

I'm not sufficiently cerebral to process all of this, but I acknowledge greatness when I encounter it even if I don't fully comprehend it.

This is the kind of history that needs to be taught in schools. The call of Delores, and our lady of Guadalupe. Mexican civil rights, and the cast system of Spaniards, Mexicans and Indians. Juarez and his fight for liberty and adoration for Lincoln and the this government. When I was in High School there wasn't one word about Mexico, the politics, religion, the poverty, and the "drunken abuelas" yet there was at least 30% Mexicans present sitting in those seats. I listen to Cable news and there isn't one reporter crossing the border to let us know what President Obrador is doing.

What's going on down there affects us almost just as much as anything going on here.

"Eventually, I was handed a note from the MP. It said to cut my hair. "

I have to know. Was this note written in English, or Spanish? Inquiring minds and all.

Even though my MP, Jasper McClellan, was a Mexican citizen, having been born in Colonia Juarez, and was completely bilingual, he always spoke, and wrote, to us in English.

I received the obituary in May for my little sister from Family Search on her birthday. It included the address where my family lived when at the time of her passing, when I was but a child myself. We were living in Salt Lake City then.

When I visited there in June I made sure to stop by at the street address to visit our childhood home. Only the driveway where my brothers and I walked was left of it, as it was replaced by townhouses and co-ops. Then it was two houses on two country lots in Holladay.

A reminder of how progress has changed the landscape, but time hasn't erased the memories of childhood or longings for a time long ago that will never come again.

Salt Lake City is a much busier city now than it was then, and the cars drive much faster - 70 mph on the freeway in city traffic. I'm glad I don't have to live there, and don't envy those who do.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/24/2019 12:39AM by Amyjo.