Mother's Day Tribute to Grandma Ruby Andrew

I love this picture of my Grandma Andrew reading to her children. To me it typifies the wonderful kind of mother that Grandma Andrew was. I admire how Grandma would take time out of her busy life to read to her children. I love how attentive the young children are and even Diana is deep in thought, pondering on her mother's words!

As I see the picture of my Mom in her wedding dress on the table, it reminds me of what I read in Grandpa Andrew's journal. When my Dad was released from his mission, the Andrew family traveled to Los Angeles to pick him up, even "Sherm the Worm" and "Doug the Bug" as my Grandpa Edwards would call them. Ray had arranged to give an engagement ring to LaDeane the minute he was released from his mission. LaDeane was the first to get married and the wedding date was set 6 weeks away. After the ring was presented, they travelled down to Mexico to see the sites. Grandma Andrew worried for the rest of the trip how to get everything ready for the wedding! Oh the things mothers go through for us!

Mother's Day Tribute to Grandma Addie May Edwards

In our family growing up as young kids, we would always run to stand next to Grandma Edwards and measure ourselves up to her to see if we had reached her height. Once we had, it was a day of celebration and a symbol of achieving greatness and maturity.

Did any of you cousins do that in your families? 

She was such an amazing example of someone that we can still look up to and attempt to try to "measure ourselves" up to the kind of person that she was.

My Dad once said this about his mother
"Mom was small in stature, but as a mother, she was a giant. Whatever life offered her each day, she adjusted to it quietly, no pretense ever. At the age of five, I was stricken with polio. I remember the long hours and days and months Mother cared for me. She would boil hot Kenny-packs and pin them on me around the clock. Mine was a miraculous healing. Through the efforts of my Mom, my family's faith, and prayers and blessings from my Father in Heaven, I was healed.

George Alexander Reid

George Alexander Reid was my Great-Grandma Barlow's father. He was born in Salt Lake City in 1862, just a short 15 years after the pioneers arrived in the valley. He grew up in a beautiful home at the corner of 3rd West and North Temple, where BYU Salt Lake and KSL TV are located today. I work only one block west of there and as I walk past that corner daily, I think about the Reids living there in the late 1800's - what life was like for them as Salt Lake was growing around them and where the Salt Lake Temple was being constructed only a couple of blocks away. He grew up knowing Brigham Young for the first 15 years of his life. 

Young George was probably fascinated with trains as he lived only two blocks down from the train station. His father did some carpentry work for the railroad. When George was only seven years old, the trains tracks from the eastern United States met the tracks from the West Coast just north of the Great Salt Lake to form the first transcontinental railroad. George studied and learned all about the railroad and became a train engineer for the Union Pacific Railroad Company.

George met a young lady named Eliza Jane Garrick, whose family benefited from the transcontinental railroad as they arrived by train in Salt Lake City from New York City when she was 15 years old. The Garricks built a house just up the street from the Reids and only a few short years later, George fell in love with the young lady with the east coast accent. More about her next week!

George Alexander Reid and Eliza Jane Garrick

This week I was telling my Mom how much fun I am having being a grandpa and some of the things that I enjoy doing with my grandkids. She then told me how much she enjoyed when her Great-Grandpa Reid would tell her stories and nursery rhymes and then teasingly mix up or alter the ending causing her to giggle and correct him. That is one of my favorite things to do as well!

I loved hearing Mom tell me that about Great-Grandpa Reid. I had never realized before that she knew her Great-Grandpa and Grandma Reid. They are Grandma Barlow's Mom and Dad. Grandpa Reid died in 1947 when my mom was eight years old and Grandma Reid died in 1954. They were both born in the 1860's in Salt Lake City, just a little more than 12 years after the first pioneers came into Utah! It just amazes me that my Mom knew someone that knew Brigham Young! 

I don't know much about Grandpa and Grandma George and Eliza Reid, but fortunately Grandma Barlow wrote a few pages about her parents before she died. Aunt Glenda sent me these writings recently and I will be sharing a little about them in coming weeks.

James and Marie Davidson

Peter Reid and Diana Davidson are my Great-Grandma Barlow's grandparents. Diana's parents, James and Marie Davidson, were expert weavers in Scotland. A little more than ten years after Diana came to America, the Davidsons decided to come across the ocean and settle with the Saints in the Salt Lake Valley. With their expert weaving skills, they quickly found work at the woolen mills at the mouth of Big Cottonwood Canyon. Unfortunately, tragedy struck the Davidson family only a couple of years later.

James and Marie Davidson and their twelve year-old son, Joseph, left Salt Lake and went down to the southwest area of the Territory (currently Nevada) to visit their married daughter, Maggie, and possibly settle there themselves. After the visit, they mounted their horse-driven wagon and started back on the 60 mile trail to St. George. Along the way, their wagon wheel broke and they were quickly getting short on water in the deadly June heat. Possibly knowing they would all not make it with the little water they had left, James and Diana sent their 12 year-old son on horseback with the canteen to fetch some water at the well-known watering well along the trail which was several miles away.

During the night on June 12, 1969, three men were at the watering well when a famished horse came straggling into the camp. One of them back-tracked the horse's trail and found the young boy's body only a scant ½ mile away from the well, so swollen and distorted from the heat that recognition was impossible. The empty canteen by his side bore eloquent testimony as to the cause of his death. Four days later, fearing what they would find, they found the bodies of the boy's parents, lying side by side under a blanket propped up against a desert palm for shade against the deadly summer heat.

This tragic story of Grandma Barlow's great-grandparents was written in the 1915 church magazine, "The Improvement Era". It is also recorded in the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers Lessons. All three were buried there in the Nevada desert, and there is now a marble and rock gravesite set up for them there. There is a lot more to this story. You can read about it from these sources:

https://books.google.com/books?id=H3AwAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA513&lpg=PA513&dq=James+Davidson+Nevada+desert&source=bl&ots=MgFVfIHJtq&sig=XEiFORvOVso9Ypg2ejEcanFZTC4&hl=en&sa=X&ei=uF6pVIDLFoiuyQStmYCYAw&ved=0CD4Q6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=James%20Davidson%20Nevada%20desert&f=false

https://dcms.lds.org/delivery/DeliveryManagerServlet?dps_pid=IE3197126

http://www.utahsdixie.info/hs/y02-davidson.html

Grandpa Barlow's Brilliantly Colored House

My Grandpa Barlow's house was featured in the 1938 Salt Lake Tribune describing it as "the most colorfully brilliant thing visible for blocks around there". I love this article's description of the brilliant colors of their yard.  I remember vividly the arch entry way into their backyard on the right side of the house. It was magical. It seems many of my ancestors had talents in horticulture and landscaping. Why couldn't I have gotten some of those genes?

Welcome to the family, little Leonard! Only 106 years late:)

Today, I was honored and blessed to add little Leonard Wolstenholme to our family tree on FamilySearch.org. Who is Leonard? He is my Grandma Barlow’s nephew. His mother, Mabel, is Grandma Barlow’s eldest sister. Unfortunately, Mabel died as a young 21 year-old the day she gave birth to Leonard in November 1908. Little Leonard tried holding on, but he also passed away after only 5 weeks of life. So why wasn’t he ever recorded on our family tree? I am not sure why, but fortunately it only took a few hours of research to find the defining link between mother and child.

As I was viewing the Reid’s family tree last night, I noticed a warning that Mabel may have a duplicate record on FamilySearch, as show here:

Wanting to help keep our Family Tree up-to-date, I wanted to research to determine if the duplicate records were actually the same person that existed on our family tree.

This is my family tree before adding little Leonard. Mabel and her husband, William Wolstenholme, are shown having only one child - William Arvel Wolstenholme, born in 1906.

Reid Family Tree

This picture shows the duplicate record. It shows a Mabel Helen Reid on FamilySearch being married to a William Wolstenholme, but their only child’s name is Leonard Lee Wolstenholme living in 1908. There is no record of their other child, William Arvel.

Duplicate record of Mabel Helen Reid

Could this be the same Mabel as the one in my family tree? This record didn’t have any birth dates or death dates for Mabel or William, but little Leonard definitely seemed to fit the same time period as his parents. Looking closer, I noticed that Leonard’s birth date matched exactly to the day that Mabel died as shown on my family tree. Could that be the reason that Mabel died? Did she die giving birth to Leonard? It seems likely since she was only 21 years old when she died, but why wasn’t there any information about a baby? Neither was there was any documentation anywhere on our family tree that showed the cause of death. Further research was needed.

I jumped to Ancestry.com and viewed other people’s Reid family trees. Not one of them had little Leonard on them. I then wanted to find the cause of Mabel’s death. I searched for her death certificate, but couldn’t find it at first. I had to eventually search through all the death certificates for people who died in Utah in November 2008 and finally found it. The name on the death certificate was “Wilstonhome” instead of Wolstenholme, thus explaining why the simple search didn’t find it. The cause of death was difficult to read, and didn’t really provide any information to me that her death could have been caused due to complications with delivering a baby as shown here:

Mabel's Death Certificate

The next step was to run searches on Ancestry’s 13 billion records to find anything about Leonard. From experience, I have learned that you have to sometimes be creative when searching for records. 

You have to vary the criteria to allow for misspellings and inconsistencies. After a few searches, I was finally able to find two key documents. The first was a tombstone for “Lenard Lee Wolstenholme”. Even though the spelling of the name was different, the date and place matched up. It didn't show who his parents were though:

The second document, however, provided the golden answers to what I was searching for. This death certificate shows that Mabel and William Wolstenholme did have a child in Pleasant Green, Utah in November 2008 and that his name was Leonard Lee Wolstenholme! His death was also correctly shown in December of that same year.

Leonard's Death Certificate

This death certificate provided the proof I needed to be able to merge the duplicate record back to Mabel in our family tree. Little Leonard now appears with his older brother on my Reid Family Tree. Welcome Leonard, nice having you on our family tree!