More Lessons from Family History

They were my first cousins, four times removed, according to Ancestry.com; I'll have to take Ancestry's word for that (I don't really understand what "four times removed" means), but my great-great-great-grandfather and their father were brothers. The girls were born in Tennessee, in 1815 and 1818. Most of my ancestors moved west during the 1830s, to Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas. By 1837 my great-great-great-grandfather had left Tennessee and was in Arkansas. I think the girls' family must have moved there around the same time, because Nancy Jane, the younger sister, married in Arkansas in 1838 and her older sister Mary married there in 1839. The men they married were brothers; the Dunlap boys also had been born in Tennessee. I don't know if the two families, the Whartons and the Dunlaps, were from the same area of Tennessee, or if the young people met in Arkansas. In those days, families were large; Mary and Jesse Jr. had ten children, and Nancy Jane and Lorenzo had eight. They lived in what is now Madison County, Arkansas. I have read that Jesse Dunlap ran a general store, a mill, and a blacksmith shop; I don't know about Lorenzo.

By 1857, the two families were ready to move west, to California. I've read that Jesse's family left with three wagons, nine yoke of oxen, thirty cattle, three guns (plus pistols and knives), provisions, gear for trail, and $320. Lorenzo's family had one wagon, four yoke of oxen, and twelve cattle. They were part of a wagon train that assembled at Beller's Stand in April 1857. Jack Baker lead the group, which set off, following the Cherokee Trail west.

In September 1857, the wagon train was camped in an area known as Mountain Meadows in southwestern Utah. There, they were attacked by Mormon militiamen and their Indian allies. All of the emigrants, except for a few small children, were murdered. The seventeen survivors included three of Mary and Jesse's children and two of Nancy and Lorenzo's children. The children were cared for initially by the families and neighbors of the men who had murdered their parents and siblings, until 1859, when the Federal government sent the Army to retrieve them. The children were returned to Arkansas and were raised by relatives.

I had never heard of the Mountain Meadows Massacre until I found mention of it attached to the lives of Mary and Nancy Jane, first cousins of my great-great-grandfather. Historian Will Bagley has written a compelling book about it, Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows, which provides the historical context for this dreadful event. The Mormons and the Federal Government were on the verge of war in 1857, and Mormon leaders were preparing for the defense of Utah from an invasion by the United States. It is not clear that Mormon leaders ordered the massacre of the emigrants at Mountain Meadows (although Bagley believes they did), but they did create the environment that led otherwise law-abiding men to massacre men, women, and children. The historical record is clear; closing the overland road through the Great Basin was Brigham Young's trump card, and he was prepared to play it as the conflict with the Federal Government escalated. Bagley quotes Brigham Young:

"If the United States send their army here and war commences, the travel must stop; your trains must not cross this continent back and forth. To accomplish this I need only say a word to the [tribes,] for the Indians will use them up unless I continually strive to restrain them. I will say no more to the Indians, let them alone, but do as you please. And what is that? It is to use them up; and they will do it."

"Use them up" means "kill them."

It was decades later that one man, John Lee, was tried and convicted of the murders at Mountain Meadows, in what passed for justice at the time.

I don't know if Brigham Young and his inner circle actually gave an order to kill the emigrants or not. The journal pages, the diaries, and the letters that might have clarified the role of Brigham Young and the other leaders of the Mormon Church of the day have disappeared. But the records of the speeches they made and the sermons they gave have not been lost. These are the men who created the environment that allowed the Mountain Meadows Massacre to happen, and so history has held them responsible.

The History of Ordinary Lives

A friend, just back from Thanksgiving, said she had gone through old photographs with her mother while home for the holiday. I told her that was good, that I wished I had done more of that, while my mother was alive. I had started trying to learn something of my family’s history in a limited way before my parents died, but didn't ask as many questions as I should have. Going through my mom's house, I found photographs of people that I will never know who they are. I did get some information though from both my parents, and am glad that I did, but I wish I had done a better job of it.

Several years ago, based on what my mom could tell me, I had checked out some of the databases that the Mormon Church has assembled and made available on line. I eventually subscribed to Ancestry.com and assembled a massive family tree based on linking to trees other people had done that were of unclear accuracy. I only worked on it intermittently, and although there was something very gratifying about figuring out which of several people with the same name in the census records actually was the person I was looking for, I wasn't very systematic and didn't find out anything that was particularly interesting. Without stories or context or knowing about the people, extending a family tree back into the 18th century seemed a pretty empty exercise.

Then a couple of months ago, I started being a little more systematic, and trying to confirm some of the people and relationships that I wasn't sure about. And in the process, I got hooked, trying to reconstruct these 19th century lives from census records and engraving on tombstones and Civil War pension records. I hadn't known, before, how deep were my Southern roots (I grew up in Oklahoma and Kansas, and never considered myself a Southerner, even though I now live in Atlanta), but my ancestors over the generations made their way from Pennsylvania and Maryland to North Carolina and South Carolina and Georgia and then west to Alabama and Mississippi and Arkansas and then to Texas and eventually to Oklahoma. As best I can tell, my relatives who were here by the late 18th century were on the right side of the Revolutionary War (a great-great-great-great-grandfather, a veteran of the Revolutionary War, had trouble getting his pension because he was illiterate and couldn't read the discharge papers he needed to establish his service record) but they were uniformly on the wrong side of the Civil War. Two great-great-grandfathers fought in different units of the Confederate Army, and both had brothers (or brothers-in-law) who died. I've never been particularly interested in Civil War history, but it does make me wonder what cause these hardworking subsistence farmers were fighting for. (A cousin several times removed has relayed a family story that our great-great-grandfather said later in his life that the whole thing had been a bad idea. It may have had something to do with having been there when his nephew was shot in the head during the siege of Port Hudson.)

So I am looking for records from Marion and Fayette Counties in Alabama, and Itawamba County in Mississippi. There are other counties, too, that I haven't looked for yet. These are places whose histories are documented by local historians, working as volunteers for county historical societies, mostly. A massive amount of information is on line now, through commercial sites like Ancestry, but also through noncommercial volunteer-built sites that are part of the USGenWeb project. There are lots of local histories that are written by local historians and published in limited runs by small presses. Once they go out of print, they are really hard to find (and expensive if you do find them), but presumably there are copies in the local library or at the county historical society.

Until I got interested in places like Itawamba County, Mississippi, or Fayette County, Alabama, I never thought much about who documents the histories of small places. With so much mobility, is it doomed to disappear, without a critical mass of local people to keep it going? (My family moved to Woodward, Oklahoma, in 1969. Although I've enjoyed visiting the local historical museum over the years, the history there wasn't the history of my family, who came to Coal County and Greer County from Texas, back when Oklahoma was still Indian Territory.) Of course, now there is the internet, which I know has been huge for genealogy. Has it done the same for local history? For while most of us no longer live in the same communities that our parents lived in, much less our grandparents or great-grandparents, all you have to do is type a name in Google, and you can find more than you imagined about the people who came before you, or the places where you live. And people like me are looking for histories of Fayette County, Alabama, and seriously considering becoming dues-paying members of the Itawamba Historical Society. The baby boom generation is approaching retirement age. Maybe technology will make up for some of what has been lost with the mobility of my generation. For what it’s worth, I did mail that check yesterday.