Pioneer Daughter

(Sorry about yesterday. I was up in West Valley City visiting my dear friend Mandy (hi, Mandy!), and we didn't return until quite late. And then our internet was flaky until about 10 this morning. Ah, excuses, excuses!)

I spent some time yesterday with my ancestors. Why, you ask? Well, I'm going to join the Daughters of Utah Pioneers! Why, you ask? (My, you have a lot of questions!) For several reasons. First, I love family history and geneology. Second, I love learning about pioneer times (I was a HUGE fan of Laura Ingalls Wilder). Third, I want to get to know the older women in our ward a little better (the "camp" I will be joining is basically our ward). So the DUP it is!

To join the DUP, you must have at least one direct ancestor who crossed the plains before May 10, 1869, when the transcontinental railroad opened for through traffic. Of my ancestral lines, all but one (my great-grandmother, Emma Margaret Tree, was born in Surrey, England, in 1878) came across the plains. Most came in wagons, but one group came in handcarts in 1856--not the ill-fated Willie-Martin group, but one that left much earlier in the season. I have ancestors that came from Nauvoo, some from Scotland, and some from Switzerland.

In filling out the paperwork to join the DUP, I had to select up to four pioneer ancestors. In the interest of being fair to both my maternal and paternal sides, I chose two from each side (out of 27 in all). In the interest to being fair to the (very, very, VERY small) feminist part of my brain, I chose two women and two men.

(By the way, that feminist part was amused by the emphasis the DUP paperwork placed on my husband: "I, (your name) born (birthdate), wife of (husband's name) born (his birthdate)." In two places, no less! Why the interest in my husband, you might ask? He's not joining, because A) he's not a daughter of anything, and B) I don't think he has any pioneer ancestors.)

Anyway, I chose:

• Eliza Baldwin Pace was born 8 April 1806 in Mississippi. Eliza's husband Elisha died in Nauvoo a few months following the Prophet's death, which left her with three children still living. Eliza, her widowed sister Sarah, and the children were driven out of Nauvoo by the mobs in the fall of 1845, having been too poor to move out before that. They crossed the plains with the Brigham Young Company of 1848. Eliza died in 1863 in Bountiful, Utah. (maternal line)

• Benjamin Franklin Pendleton was born 13 May 1818 in New York. He came across with the same Brigham Young Company of 1848 as Eliza Pace, which tickles me because there was no way for them to know that her great-great granddaughter (my mother) would marry his great-great grandson (my father). Benjamin settled in both the Salt Lake Valley and St. George, Utah. (First wife lived in SL, second wife (my line) lived in St. George. There's a funny story about that, I'll have to write about it sometime.) He died in 1881 in St. George. (paternal line)

• Philinda Upson Standley (or Stanley) was born 1 August 1814 in Ohio. She came to Utah (at very long last, their family having stayed in Winter Quarters and (later) Nebraska since 1846) as part of the 3rd Company of 1852. She died in Richmond, Utah, in 1892.

• Jacob Tobler was born in Schonengrund, Appenzell, Switzerland on 15 January 1833. He emigrated to Utah in 1861 with the Sixtus E. Johnson Company, and was promptly sent down to Santa Clara, Utah, near St. George. I've often wondered what that young man, raised in the green mountains of Switzerland, thought about the red rock desert of Utah's Dixie. Must have been one heck of a culture shock. Jacob had many wives (I think four?), and died with a large posterity in 1918, still in Santa Clara.

So, there it is. I'm pretty excited to get back into family history, at least as much as my primary occupation allows me.

Now, if only I wasn't the youngest person by two generations at the meetings...