First we have my parents (2); then grandparents (4); and, now, great-grandparents (8)...

 

Daniel Gard Wright and wife Emily Lenora Butler

Abraham Mitchell Woolsey and wife Dianah Rebecca Radford

 

Moroni Miner and wife Nancy Elizabeth Chase

Simon Eugene Dalton and wife Jane Elizabeth Huntington

 

Stories:

 

Daniel Gard Wright was born in Indiana - near Indianapolis. After his mother died and just before the Civil War started, he headed West. His story was that he had swum every river west of the Mississippi. He lived in Fairplay, Colorado, Virginia City, Montana and stopped long enough in Ogden, Utah to meet and marry Emily Lenora Butler. They continued on to live in the Gold Country of California - the foothills west of Sacramento and Stockton. He was a mountain man and a blacksmith. Emily died in childbirth - her 6th child in 9 years. The kids, including grandpa Robert L. Wright, went to Utah to live with their Butler grandparents for several years. Dan later remarried, had 3 more daughters - spaced a number of years apart! - and died in the Stockton, California area in 1913. I've made a connection with the descendants of that 2nd family and acquired a bunch of photos we never had before.

 

Abraham Mitchell Woolsey was born in Weber county, Utah (near Ogden) in 1854 - not that long after the first settlers in Utah. His father, Thomas Woolsey, was an amazing man, but a bit off-the-wall. Kind of a Porter Rockwell type - did the Mormon Battalion, was one of the first settlers into the SL Valley, had at least 6 wives and 28 children... Abraham married first at age 19 (to 16 yr old Susan Black) in Fillmore, Utah, but she and their baby died in childbirth that year. Four years later he married Dianah Rebecca Radford, daughter of John Whitlock and Rachel Leah Smith Radford. They had 8 children, including my grandmother, Leah Anne Woolsey. Diannah died when she was only 54. Abraham was a farmer - he owned 160 acres out near Ririe in Bonneville county. Probably very near the cemetery where he is buried. My cousin Phyllis Wardle Higley recalls meeting him as a child after he had a series of strokes in his older age and was in a wheel chair, with impaired speech. He had gorgous white curly hair and long white beard. His granddaughter Venda Brown Castleberry wrote a prize winning story for the Relief Society that tells of him. A .pdf copy is linked... 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Moroni Miner was born in Kirtland, Ohio in 1835, during the earliest days of the Mormon Church. His parents, Albert and Tamma Durfee Miner,  were baptized in 1831 and 1832. Tamma's parents were also early converts; Albert's were not. Moroni was blessed by the Prophet Joseph Smith as a baby. The family moved to Nauvoo about 1840 (Moroni was about 5) , where they lived until the Saints were forced to leave around 1846 (Moroni was about 11). In 1848 his father died in central Iowa and his mother Tamma and the children continued on to Winter Quarters and then to the Salt Lake Valley in 1850, when Moroni was 15. At age  The family moved to Springville in 1851. Moroni and his brothers helped their step-father do carpentry and cabinet work, helped in building the fort around the town, hauled freight to and from the Missouri River, worked on the transcontinental railroad construction through Utah, and fought in the Black Hawk Indian Wars. At age 25 he married 15-year-old Nancy Elizabeth Chase, daughter of Solomon and Lydia Thorn Chase. They raised 10 of their 15 children to maturity. Moroni farmed and raised stock. In 1893, when their youngest child was four years old, he served a mission to the Southern States. Nancy died at age 82 in 1928, but Moroni lived past his 100th birthday.

 

 

Simon Eugene Dalton was born in Centerville, Utah near Ogden in 1852. His parents, Simon Cooker and Elnora Lucretia Warner Dalton, had migrated to the Salt Lake Valley in 1849 in the Silas Richards' Company, which counted about 100 wagons. He married Elizabeth Jane Huntington, daughter of Oliver Boardman and Hannah Mendenhall Sanders Huntington, in 1877; he was 24 and she was 18. He spent most of his life farming in the Springville-Mapleton area. He and his wife had 7 children, only one of which died as a baby. My grandmother Hannah Elnora "Ella" Dalton Miner was the eldest of their children. The first four were girls, and they were required to help with the stock and farming just as if they were boys. She died of a heart attack at age 65 in 1924; he died at 81 in 1933. He had been part of the original Springville 2nd Ward Bishopric for 12 years.