Ducking a Smiting Feels So Good

Mormons have a very broad and democratic collection of biographies of their 19th Century predecessors. This is due to two causes. The first is our belief that family bonds have eternal significance which leads us to seek familiarity with our dead and to leave records that will allow our descendants to know us. The second is that the first Latter-day Saints felt they were eyewitnesses of something important and wanted to leave a testimony of it. Thanks to these factors, it is easy to find research on hundreds of second-tier associates of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, and tens of thousands of multi-page biographical essays on nobodies written either first-hand by the nobodies themselves or by their children. These are of most interest to direct descendants of these people, so today most of those 19th Century Mormons are each known in detail to a few percent of present-day Mormons, but we like hearing the stories of others’ kin too.

A few of my favorites:

Noah Rogers and Eda Hollister: He was sent on a mission to Tahiti, learned of Joseph Smith’s murder, returned to find his family fleeing Illinois, and died a month later half-way across Iowa. She carried on leading the family to Utah.

Helena Ericksson and Carl Roseberry: She converted in Malmo, Sweden in 1853, and he did four years later. He died working on a railroad tunnel in Utah, and she lived as a poor widow for two decades in southern Utah and Arizona full of hope in the gospel.

Sarah Alydia Terry: She became a telegraph operator at 15, sent to man a remote station on a ranch in Arizona. The telegraph girls were the original texters. Most of their traffic was just the girls chatting with one another via Morse code up and down the line.

I could rattle off a dozen such, and if you asked another dozen Mormons to chew your ear off doing the same, chances are you would end up hearing about at least 80 distinct individuals. A very good blog that specializes on histories of obscure Mormons of no great importance is www.keepapitchinin.org.