I find myself lying here awake with a splitting headache. The rest of my body doesn't feel too bad. The song, "There are no cats in America" - or rather, just that line, is firmly stuck on repeat.
***
Yesterday I had such plans for how to use my time. They all got completely derailed.
We are getting our home refinanced. After the appraisers, who were very nice, left, I intended to go find and send in the rest of the paperwork, work on Czech, finish some stuff for my church calling, and write a short Python program that would basically be an overlap between two things I'm doing right now.
None of it happened because instead, I noticed that the Church History Library had granted me access to a digitized register of early church members in Scotland. The part I cared about was ca 1850-1875.
It was fascinating.
"Sorry my ancestors were poking you, Kate!"
Danny and I have been researching his fifth great grandfather's family. One of his sons did not emigrate to Utah (cough cough well it was really Wyoming but on the border) with the rest of the children. He stayed in Scotland, married, had eleven children. All of them need temple work.
We have found 7/11 of the children. 4 sons have been very difficult to track, what with names like George, William, James, and John Wilson.
George Wilson, the grandfather of those missing sons, was the branch president of the Motherwell Branch, emigrating ca 1875 (not sure the exact date), which is rather late for someone baptized in 1852. But he was running the branch. I saw that the branch records existed and requested to view them. I didn't think they'd let me, since I was sure they contain excommunication records. Those are usually private.
They did, and they did!
And they were *fascinating* to me. I spent hours pouring through the records.
The first thing I noticed was how superior they were to records made in the United States during a similar time period of the church. I have the Brigham City ward's church records, also with excommunications (and the reasons for them!), on microfilm. I found a list of people who owed money to the perpetual emigration fund, and it included one of my ancestors. I shared this treasure with the church history department people and they were able to use it to cite a bunch of people in the Early Overland Pioneer database. You'd be surprised how many pioneers don't have real evidence to prove they really were pioneers!
I've also accessed early church records from Nauvoo on microfilm in the familysearch special collections room. My impression of early church records was, "What in the world?! My Czechs kept way, wayyyyyyyyy better records." The pages were torn and hard to read. Information was missing or illegible. A lot of the Nauvoo records were 1850's reconstructions of 1840's events. And they weren't available to view easily, which feels frustratingly ironic because of the fact that the church is the gatekeeper to the genealogy of so much of the world. Just not to ourselves, apparently.
And I get it. Sealings, especially early sealings, are not something that should be open. The early sealings are a mess. The early saints didn't have the same understanding that we do today about sealings.
This Scottish register was nothing like either of these records. It was neat, orderly, organized, legible, and contained a TON of information: a list of members with name, birthdate, birthplace, name of father, residence, date baptized and by whom, date confirmed and by whom, and notes (emigrated, removed (ie moved), cut off, died). A list of all priesthood holders, their names, offices, dates called. A list of infants blessed with birthdate, birthplace, both parents' names, date blessed, who blessed them. A list of people who married in the branch, including birthdates, both their parents, who married them and where. A list of people who died including their cause of death. A tallied up demographic sheet of how many people joined the church, moved into or out of the conference (church was organized a bit differently then), emigrated, were cut off, or "scattered" (maybe this means they were just "missing"?). The branch kept growing steadily but shrinking steadily, too, with emigrants leaving.
George Wilson was on every page. He was the branch president starting in December 1867. He also baptized about 20% of all the members there.
James Wilson, his son who stayed, became much more interesting after looking at this register. Here are the facts, which basically just lead to all kinds of other questions:
Everything, except what's noted, happens in Motherwell, Lanarkshire, Scotland.
1850 his mom is baptized
1852 his dad is baptized
1855 he and his older sister Isabella are baptized. He is 11 and the oldest son.
26 September 1866 - government records say he was married to Jessie Robertson in Irvine, Ayrshire.
15 October 1866 - James is "cut off" from the church
March 1867 James and Jessie's first child is born in a town next to Irvine, Ayrshire. There are 25.5 weeks between when they got married and when the baby is born. Since the baby lived to adulthood (we can't find him after he's sentenced to a few months in prison for stealing some chickens), he was conceived out of wedlock. Babies that premature would not survive if born in that time and place.
December 1867 - George Wilson the father is called as the branch president.
February 1868 James and his wife Janet Robertson (Janet and Jessie are synonymous in Scottish. Weeeeeeeeird) are baptized by James Bruce, Isabella's husband. The same day, their baby George is blessed.
1869 - their baby Martha is blessed. She was born in Ayrshire as well.
1871? - James Bruce and his family emigrate to Utah (cough Wyoming)
1872 - their third baby is not blessed, at least in the Holytown Branch. I should check the Irvine branch records, which are included in this 450+ page collection I have access to for the next month. It would be unlikely for them to have gone to church in Irvine. The third+ children were born in Motherwell, I think. I should check that.
One of the family histories alludes to James not emigrating because his wife Jessie didn't want to. There could be a lot of reasons why they didn't emigrate.
Clearly, the family stopped going to church, since they stopped having their babies blessed at church.
Clearly, James Bruce (and Isabella, the older sister) were involved somehow when James returned to the church.
Clearly, for some reason at one point in time, James did want to return to the church. It may have been mostly for social reasons, or perhaps he felt truly converted. I don't know. I his wife also joined the church, which none of us knew before.
The contrast in quality of these records is a testament to me of the actual roughness of the conditions of the saints in Ohio, Missouri, Illinois, Iowa, and Utah. It causes me to understand much better how frontier-ish the frontier really was. Glasgow was a way, wayyyyyyyyy more "civilized" part of the planet at the time. It shows.
What is the same today as it was back then: families sometimes got torn in half by decisions to stay or leave the church. It is not different today. The only difference is that, with some 180+ years perspective, it's easy to feel compassion and love for all of them. For the father whose eldest son apparently fell into activity. For the son who had to have a shotgun wedding with his knocked up girlfriend and, most likely as a consequence of that, was "cut off" from the church (maybe to protect the church's name? Maybe because he was unrepentant? Maybe because of a lot of things. Many questions...). For the mother who never saw her son, daughter in law, and their eleven children again after she emigrated. The facts without their connection to the emotionally distracting details make it so easy to really feel a strong sense of love towards these people.
I discovered that James's younger sister Elizabeth died of pulmonary tuberculosis at age 22 in 1872 (this was wrong in familysearch - they said she died as an infant, but gave no death date. I fixed it). Civil records show she had this terrible disease for a year. Maybe the death of his sister was devastating to James's faith. Maybe he was expecting a miracle.
Yes, these ancestors have been "poking" me, indeed. So far I've found 7 names that need temple work on this side of the family since we've been working on this about once/week for the past two months. This is kind of laughable, compared to the Czech side. But for Danny's side, it's quite impressive.
Piecing together their story is even more valuable and meaningful. It's part of our story, too.
James and Jessie had 11 children. Their children wrote tributes of love to them in the newspaper. These people were good, and I love them.
No comments:
Post a Comment