Passage

In order to understand our own passage I think we need to understand the one of the people we come from. This story starts with the past and hopefully makes its way to the present.

I grew up in a multigenerational Mormon (otherwise known as the Latter Day Saints) family. My parents are Mormon, my grandparents were Mormon. About five generations behind me, on my father’s side, my ancestors blazed a trail that started in Denmark for one, in England for the other. Both helped with the construction of what was to become Salt Lake City. One ended his years in Mexico and the other just outside of Salt Lake City. The generations between my pioneer ancestors and me have been devoted Mormons. I will always honor where I came from even though my own passage has caused me to leave the faith in which I was raised.

Thomas Steed

I recently came across my paternal grandmother’s grandfather journal. In it he, Thomas Steed, tells of his trip from becoming Mormon in Worcestershire, England in 1840, at the age of 14 to near his end at 84 years old in Farmington, Utah.

It starts with his parents which he describes his mother being, “of medium size, patient, very religious, naturally kind, open hearted and generous to a fault, giving almost her last crust to anyone in need.” His father (I can’t even think how far back of a grandfather that would make him to me) was “about six feet tall, heavy set (about 200 pounds), powerful, sober, hardworking, honest, industrious, thoroughly reliable. For a number of years he was the night watchman in the town of Malvern, England and later the foreman of the public highway.”

In 1835, when Thomas was 9 years old, his parents left the Church of England and joined United Brethren, opening their home to hold meetings. ‘I was in my fourteenth year and almost a skeptic in regard to the religion of the day. In the Sunday school I had asked my teacher if anybody knew that God lived, and if Jesus was the Redeemer crucified 1800 years ago. He answered: “My boy, you ought not to ask such a question, you ought to believe; I don’t know and I don’t’ know who could tell you!” The same question I asked of a number of other individuals who I thought could know, and received the same answer. That caused me to think that there was nothing in religion, if nobody knew anything about these things, and I made up my mind to have nothing to do with it.’ On my own personal note, I find it ironic that this same spirit caused one of his great granddaughters, me, to leave the faith which brought him to America; the same faith that him and the generations between us were so devoted to.

By no means in my American History class, 13 years ago, did I consider that one of my relatives actually lived what I had been learning. At the age of 18 with some of his Uncles, Thomas Steed, set out for Nauvoo, Illinois from their homes in England. Lying there in the text before me, my great, great, great grandfather was telling of arriving in New Orleans in 1844, riding on the Little Maid of Iowa, perhaps her last voyage, up the Mississippi River until they reached Nauvoo.

Shortly after the murder of the church’s prophet and founder, Joseph Smith. he moved with his uncles and their families along with his new wife to Keokuck, Iowa I think in spring of 1846. There they worked and saved for the journey west. “In June, 1849, the great calamity of Asiatic cholera spread its awful devastations through the United States and was very sever in Keokuck also. Very many were called at a few hours’ warning; a number of our Mormon brethren and sisters were taken.”

With four wagons, nines oxen, five cows, two mules, and one horse all shared by 10 members of his extended family they fled Keokuck and started west. Shortly beyond the Missouri River they joined up with 50 other Mormons pioneers in August of 1850. They traveled the Fort Kearney and the crossing of the South Platte.”


To be continued later………....