Sidney Tanner Writes to the Family of His Deceased Wife

Sidney Tanner's wife Louisa Conlee Tanner died on September 29, 1846, at Winter Quarters. Sidney must have put off the grim task of notifying her family, because it took him seven months to write to his father-in-law, step-mother-in-law, and other family members with news of her death, and by the time he wrote this he had been remarried for more than four months to young Julia Ann Shepherd, a very brave girl to step in and care for his six motherless children.

Why was this letter in possession of the Tanner family? Is this a copy? Who owns the original? The handwriting is strikingly different from the Sidney Tanner letter featured the other day, but could be the same handwriting, perhaps written with a different pen?

A copy of this letter is in the collections of the Church History Library. The CHL copy includes a typescript, which has been corrected into standard English. I am trying to transcribe the actual letter as-is, but the computer keeps autocorrecting the transcription, so this should be approximately correct.

Winter Quarters April 13th 1847

Dear Father and Mother  Brothers & Sisters

I gladly embrace this opportunity of writing a few lines to you and tell you how we have been situated and how we are at present. we left the Iowa the 4 of March we traveled five days and stoped our youngest child by the name of James Monre was taken sick and died the 17 of March with the inflammation on the brain. we had got about 2 hundred miles from Montrose when we received your letter dated Feb 10 and you wanted to know what we wanted to moove for. it was to go to a land of freedom where we could enjoy the peace of sosiety and our liberty we did not want to live in country where their is no peace no liberty and citizens was not allowed their rights. we went on about one hundred miles farther to council point when we had another child aded to our family it was a boy ^its name was Mason Lyman^ & was born July 1 and Louisa got her health was well as ever we crost the Missouri river the last of July at council bluff where we stoped for the winter. [indecipherable] Louisa was taken sick with the fever she got ^some^ better and then took the canker and the chills fever and was sick a bout two months and then departed this life leaving her strongest testimony of the truth of the gospel of christ taught in the lasts days she requested me to write to you and tell you that she died in the full triumphs of the faith of Jesus Christ and her most desire for living was for the benefit of her family and Friends and do what she was afraid they would not do for themselves that they might arive to a glorious salvation in the kingdom of God where she

[e]xpects to meet them and enjoy their society she often spoke a bout you and wanted to see you and hoped ^that^ you would yet embrace the gospel and come to the west she died September 29 her babe was taken sick soon after she died and lived to be four months and 23 dys old it ^died^ Nov. 29 

This will be sad to you I have no toubt to hear of a death of a sister who has been near and unto you. the rest of my family is ^well^ at present

Lydia was sick last fall with the fever & ague I have six children living you gave me some very good advice to beware of false propets and evil doers that has been the cry in all ages of the world when the Lord has sent his servents and apostles forth to preach that was the sayings in the ^the days of our^ savior and apostles but the scripture says “beware of those who ware a form of Godliness and deny the power there of from such turn away   I was sorry to here of your misfortune of your getting ^your house^ burnt. I would be glad to see you all  I expect to remain here untill next spring   I want you to write to me soon as posible and I would be ^glad^ to have you come and see us

I do not want you to forsake me and the children because of our misfortune but write as ofen as you can give my respect and good wishes to all our relation and enquireing friends    the children sends their love to you all I rmain as your affectionate son and Brother

Sidney Tanner

James and Monroe Conlee

direct your letters austain post office 

Atcheson County Misouri

I concludes a record of the children ages

Allen Benedict Tanner was born March 2 1831

Lydia Tanner was born Nov 3 1832

Emma Tanner was born June 1 1835

Mary Louisa Tanner was born Sep 4 1837

Ely Elizabeth Tanner was born May 14 1840

Sidney Tanner was born March 6 1842

James Monroe Tanner was born July 30 1844

Mason Lyman Tanner was born July 1 1846

10

Mr

James or Monroe

Conlee

Union Villege

Wasington Co.

N.Y.

[postmark]

Wills and Probate: Sidney Tanner

Have you heard about Ancestry's wonderful new U.S. Wills and Probate collection? I've been using it all day and have found some great information for my book, including a notice that was misfiled into a probate folder although it belonged elsewhere, but was valuable in explaining a strange part of the history of a Missouri family.

Since I've been concentrating on Sidney Tanner's history recently, I pulled up his probate record. It was a difficult situation, since he had two wives, but only one was legally able to appear in court.

Each probate file is indexed by contents, as you can see in the right sidebar, making it easier to navigate through the file. I do wish it were possible to download the entire file with one click!

Sidney's file does not include a detailed inventory, which is disappointing, since that's my favorite part of any probate, but it does give a snapshot into the circumstances of his later years.

Have you used this new collection yet? Find anything interesting?

Sidney Tanner: A Life of Remarkable Industry

Here's a biography I just wrote for Sidney Tanner's FamilySearch Family Tree entries (LZXK-Y57) and (KWJ6-DZX). I'll include the story about his "little white cur dog" tomorrow.

Sidney Tanner, Family Tree, courtesy of Janice Salazar.

Sidney Tanner was born on April 1, 1809, in Greenwich, Washington County, New York. His mother, Lydia Stewart Tanner, seems to have been a native New Yorker; his father John Tanner was originally from Washington County, Rhode Island.

Sidney spent his young years in the busy Tanner household. He had an older half-brother, Elisha, who spent part of his time with his Bently relatives, an older brother William, a sister Mathilda, and a deceased brother, Willard.

Sidney saw five younger siblings born and three of them buried, before the Tanner family moved from Washington County to Warren County, on the other side of Lake George. There the family invested in timber land, farmed, owned stock and dairy herds, ran a hotel for occasional travelers, and provided for many of their needs, before Sidney’s mother Lydia died in 1825 after the birth of her son Albert.

Sidney was 16 years old when his father remarried young Elizabeth Beswick. She stepped into care for the large families and take over the many household and economic duties of a woman in rural 1820s America.

Five years later Sidney married Louisa Conlee. They had a young family with just two children when the missionaries of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints visited the community. Church records note that Sidney and Louisa were baptized January 3, 1833. Even in a mild winter, that would have been a cold event.

The family began to gather with the Church. Sidney’s brothers John Joshua and Nathan joined Zion’s Camp. The rest of the Tanners went to Kirtland where Sidney and Louisa helped finance the building of the Kirtland Temple. The Kirtland High Council Minutes tell that “a Meeting of the Church of Latter Day Saints was called in this place, for the purpose of blessing in the  name of the Lord, those who have heretofore assisted  in building, by their labor & other means, the house of  the Lord.” Included in the company were John Tanner and Sidney Tanner. The leaders of the Church gave each man present an individual blessing.

When Sidney and Louisa moved to Missouri, they found rich farmland and timberland and began building up their resources again. They were joined not long afterwards by the other Tanner families. Sidney and his father and brother and brother-in-law Amasa Lyman left their wives and younger children and went to work at Fort Leavenworth for 2-1/2 months to earn money, since cash was in short supply on the frontier.

It was not long before mobs drove the families off their new land. The Tanners fought the mobs as they could—Sidney was said to have fought at the Battle of Crooked River, in which case there’s a chance he may have been one of the fabled “Danites”—but the family was driven north, eventually to Montrose County, Iowa, across the Mississippi River from Nauvoo, Illinois. (Sidney also owned land in Nauvoo.)

By this time Sidney and Louisa had five children. They had two children born in Montrose County before they were again driven from their home, but before they left, they participated in the temple ordinances in the new Nauvoo Temple. Just a few days outside Nauvoo at the temporary settlement of Richardson’s Point, their twenty-month-old son James Monroe Tanner died.

Louisa gave birth to a son, Mason Lyman Tanner, while they were living in the Indian lands. She survived the childbirth but came down with what was probably scarlet fever and malaria and died at Winter Quarters, followed not long afterward by her infant son.

Sidney Tanner had to send the sad news to his in-laws, James and Elsie Cole Conley in New York. He told them that she “requested me to write to you and tell you that she died in the full triumph of the faith of Jesus Christ and her most desire for living was for the benefit of her family and friends…that they might arrive to a glorious salvation in the kingdom of God where she expects to meet them and enjoy their society.”

In those busy days with much work to do, Sidney needed someone to care for his children, so two months after Louisa’s death, the grieving widower married young Julia Ann Shepherd. She had been born in Ohio to Vermont natives Samuel and Roxalana Ray Shepherd.

Julia Ann Shepherd Tanner, Family Tree, courtesy of LarkinDixonFerrin1.

In 1848 the Tanner and Shepherd families headed west with all their provisions and animals including Sidney’s “little white cur dog” that saved Homer Duncan’s life. (See Duncan’s account in the Mormon Overland Travel database.)

Caroline Barnes Crosby noted on July 27, 1848, “Yesterday a very sad accident occured in the camp[.] one of Sidney Tanners little boys [Sidney Tanner, Jr.] was killed almost instantly by a wagon wheel running over him, he appeared like a very forward smart child for one of his age, was between 6 and 7 was driving team sitting on the tongue and fell backward.”

The Tanners reached the Salt Lake Valley in mid-October 1848, Julia carrying her infant daughter in her arms. They joined their extended family in South Cottonwood, but only lived there a few months after John Tanner’s death before heading to California with the San Bernardino Settlement.

The Tanners lived in San Bernardino until 1857, when Brigham Young called the settlers back to Utah Territory at the time Johnston’s Army was threatening the Saints. Sidney and his family eventually settled in the beautiful valley of Beaver, Utah, after Sidney helped deliver the new Australian pipe organ to the old adobe Tabernacle in Salt Lake City.

Sidney worked as a freighter, taking goods back and forth between the settlements, and was headed down to San Bernardino in September 1857 when he came upon the scene of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. The participants stopped all passers-by including Sidney and his travel companion, William Mathews, and took them past the site of the massacre in the dark of night.

Rachel Neyman Fullmer Tanner, Family Tree, courtesy of Francis Gill.

Except for his brother Nathan, none of the Tanners had cared to participate in plural marriage, but after a few years of life in Reformation-Era Utah, and despite Julia’s opposition to the practice, Sidney took a plural wife, the sturdy widow Rachel Neyman Fullmer, a member of a family deeply involved in plural marriage since the earliest days in Nauvoo. Sidney and Rachel had six children in addition to her three with Almon Fullmer, but only three of their children lived past early childhood, and their son Howard Harper Tanner was killed in a range dispute in 1891.

Sidney also married another widow, Mary Ann Neyman Nickerson Tanner, after she sued his brother John Joshua for divorce. Both marriages were an example of the common use of plural marriage as a social safety network in those days when women had few options outside marriage, and probably only Julia Ann and Rachel would have been considered his actual wives in pioneer-era Beaver.

Sidney was a strong man, a hard worker, a practical person, and dedicated to the gospel. He was, as they used to say, a pillar of his community. He served on the Beaver City Council, as a member of the bishopric of the Beaver First Ward with Bishop Marcus L. Shepherd, Julia’s brother, and as a stake high councilor.

When Sidney died on December 5, 1895, his obituary said:

Elder Tanner was born on the shores of Lake George, in the state of New York…He was a man of marvelous constitutional powers, and endured the hardships common to the early settlement of this Territory as well as that of southern California. He was one of the earliest settlers of Beaver and has done much to build up that place; and he now leaves behind him a large family of his own, as well as a host of kindred…The helpless condition of Elder Sidney Tanner during the last few years of his life was such as to make his departure not wholly unexpected to his family and relatives…the funeral services…will take place next Sunday in Beaver. 

He was known as a man of remarkable industry, temperate habits, generous disposition, and unswerving integrity. (Deseret Evening News, “Sidney Tanner Dead,” December 6, 1895.)

Sources: Sidney Tanner, His Ancestors and Descendants (DeBrouwer, 1982); John Tanner and His Family (Tanner, 1974); FamilySearch Family Tree; 1830-1880 US Census; 1852 California State Census; Joseph Smith Papers Project; Mormon Overland Travel; Diary of Caroline Barnes Crosby; Homer Duncan Autobiographical Sketch; Pioneers and Prominent Men of Utah (Esshom, 1913); More Wives Than One (Daynes, 2008); Deseret News; TheAncestorFiles.blogspot.com; history.lds.org; Nauvoo Land and Records.

Crossing the Plains, 1848

Yesterday I was thinking about John Tanner's sources on FamilySearch and realized no one had added original pioneer overland travel documents, so I pulled up the Church History Library Catalog and pulled up the Camp of Israel Schedules and Reports and pulled up Willard Richard's 1848 emigration division.

The only revelation given to Brigham Young which is included in our scriptural canon is Doctrine and Covenants 136. He was told:

 2 Let all the people of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and those who journey with them, be organized into companies, with a covenant and promise to keep all the commandments and statutes of the Lord our God. 

 3 Let the companies be organized with captains of hundreds, captains of fifties, and captains of tens, with a president and his two counselors at their head, under the direction of the Twelve Apostles. 

 4 And this shall be our covenant—that we will walk in all the ordinances of the Lord. 

 5 Let each company provide themselves with all the teams, wagons, provisions, clothing, and other necessaries for the journey, that they can....

 7 Let each company, with their captains and presidents, decide how many can go next spring; then choose out a sufficient number of able-bodied and expert men, to take teams, seeds, and farming utensils, to go as pioneers to prepare for putting in spring crops. 

 8 Let each company bear an equal proportion, according to the dividend of their property, in taking the poor, the widows, the fatherless, and the families of those who have gone into the army, that the cries of the widow and the fatherless come not up into the ears of the Lord against this people....

As you look at the records of the first pioneer companies, you can see how the pioneers put revelation into practice. Here is the record of the Amasa Lyman group in the Willard Richards company.

On the first page note Amasa Lyman and his first wife Louisa Maria Tanner and her children along with his plural wives and a few other family members. On the second page note the Duncan, Clark, Hakes, Tanner, and Adams families. My youngest was fascinated to see the children listed with their ages, and was sad to learn that 6-year-old Sidney Tanner did not survive the journey. 

A Picture of Samuel Shepherd and Charity Bates Swarthout Shepherd?

Tanner Family

Last fall Gary and Ardyn Fredericksen put this picture on Ancestry. I saw it last week and was intrigued.

None of us in this branch of the family had ever seen a picture of Samuel Shepherd, a veteran of the War of 1812, Mormon pioneer, and original settler of San Bernardino, California.

Ardyn is a descendant of Charity Bates and her first husband, Philip Swarthout.

After Philip died and after Samuel Shepherd's first wife, Roxie Ray, died, Charity and Samuel blended their large families and had a 42-year marriage before they both died of old age in 1877.

The note attached to the picture says:

I believe this to be Charity Bates Swarthout Shepherd and Sam Shepherd. This was the oldest picture in the family photos and after talking to other surviving members of the Shepherd family (living in Utah), they had this same photo.

And an additional note in Ancestry says:

See the note about the identification of the photograph. Charity's daughter, Lucinda, looks so much like her. The photo was in the collection of a direct descendent.

As with the identification of the historical Christensen and Tanner pictures — and proposed daguerreotypes of Joseph Smith; see (Rumor-Mongering: Joseph Smith Daguerreotype) and (And Yet Another Joseph Smith Photograph) — there are several techniques to identify the subjects of historical but unlabeled photographs, including the following considerations.

What is the provenance of the picture? (Who owns it and why?)

The photograph belongs to a direct descendant of Charity Bates Swarthout Shepherd. She and her husband have been very helpful in answering my questions about the family and the photograph, and the reported chain of ownership makes sense and does not contain any clues or red flags that would suggest that the subjects of the photo were any other of their ancestors.

The Fredericksens contacted an elderly Shepherd descendant in Utah and got confirmation that a descendant of Samuel also owned a copy of this picture. 

Is the technology appropriate to the time?

Yes. The picture would have to have been taken before 1877 when Samuel and Charity died. A look at the Pioneers of San Bernardino collection shows a number of similar photographs from around 1870, and they resemble the photograph in technology, detail, architecture, and vegetation.

Butcher Shop of T. F. Allen on Third Street in San Bernardino, c. 1875. Source.

San Bernardino Deluge Hose Co. 2, c. 1860-1870. Source.

Were there daguerreotypists or photographers operating in the area at the time?

Yes. See above.

Were the people being identified in the area at the time?

Yes. The Shepherds lived in San Bernardino almost continually from 1851 until they died in 1877.

1870 US Census, San Bernardino, Samuel and Charity Shepherd.

Any family resemblances? Do the ages of the people in the photograph seem to be accurate?

Yes. Both people in the picture could be in their 70s or 80s.

Here is a comparison of the subjects. First is the man in the photo followed by photos of Samuel's children; next the woman in the photo followed by photos of Charity's children. Samuel and Charity had one daughter; her photo is at the end.

Note shape of face, head, brow, noses and chin; distance between nose and mouth; male facial hair; coloring; etc.

Shepherd Family

Rollins Don Carlos Shepherd (1830-1909) c. 1900.  From FamilySearch.

Marcus deLafayette Shepherd (1824-1904). From FamilySearch.

Julia Ann Shepherd Tanner (1829-1899). From FamilySearch.

Swarthout Family

George Washington Swarthout (1817-1872). From Ancestry.

Lucinda Swarthout (1818-1895) and her husband James Coburn (1815-1898), San Bernardino.

A close-up of Lucinda.

Nathan Swarthout (1823-1903), San Bernardino Public Library.

Hamilton Swarthout (1828-1894), San Bernardino Public Library.

Daughter of Samuel and Charity

Lydia Shepherd Davidson (1836-1929), from Ancestry.

So are there family resemblances? Very definitely.

What can the clothing tell us about when the picture was taken?

Melinda Bowers is a graphic designer with a specialty in historical clothing design. She blogs at Heritage Paper Dolls.

She noted that even on the frontier, people kept up to date on fashions and the women made or altered clothing based on fashion journals, so if clothing appears to belong to a certain era, it most likely does. 

She said the following about this picture:

This dress in actually a little closer to the 1860s in style than the 1870s. In the 60s, dresses had that sloping shoulder look (think civil war era) and wider type sleeves for dressy dresses, but loose sleeves for everyday wear. Can you see the dropped shoulder on the dress? The shoulder seams are down off the natural shoulder, giving the bodice a sort of upside-down triangle look that is fitted, gathered, or pleated above the waistline. The skirt is hard to see, but the shape is a dome shape (1860s) rather than a bell shape (1870s-80s). By the 1880s, dresses were very much bell shaped, with a flared bottom, and usually drawn up into a bustle, although the work dresses wouldn't have been, since that is so impractical. But the work dresses would still have been more narrow in the 1880s than in the 1860s and early 70s. Also in the 80s, the sleeves would be more form fitting, not nearly as loose as these sleeves are.

I also have found patterns on cloth from that era similar to her dress, but I can't see the pattern very well. The pattern appears to be more similar to ones from the 1860s rather than the 70s.

What other details help locate the picture and identify the subjects?

The new England frame house in the photograph is consistent with Samuel and Charity's birthplace of Vermont and time in the Northwest Territory, Midwest, and California. All the materials showing in the house should be available in California at the time. The house, including the clapboards, resembles the one in the later picture of Lucinda and James Coburn. The vegetation including the small evergreen and fruit trees (note the grafting), are consistent with the picture being located in San Bernardino. Samuel's pipe is consistent with his history.

Conclusion

I agree with the Fredericksens that this appears to be a photograph of Samuel and Charity. Many thanks to them for putting this picture online!

So, any thoughts? Additional details you see? Is that a child standing in the doorway? If you arrive at this post by web search, have you seen a copy of this picture in the family before? Where? Were identifications included?

Samuel Shepherd and the RLDS Church

Tanner Family Line

This post is in response to an email from a Shepherd cousin wondering about the family's connection to the RLDS Church. As always, we enjoy hearing from cousins or others interested in the material on this blog.

* * *

Vermont natives Samuel Shepherd and Roxalana Ray Shepherd joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Chagrin, Ohio, undoubtedly while living on land in the Western Reserve that they received due to Samuel's service in the War of 1812.

They moved to join the Church in Missouri, where Roxie died of cholera. Samuel remarried Charity Bates Swarthout, a woman with a large family whose husband had recently died.

The blended Shepherd and Swarthout family moved West with the Saints after Joseph Smith's death, three sons serving as members of the Mormon Battalion.

In 1851 a large group of Saints — mostly Southerners but also members of the large intermarried Tanner-Lyman-Shepherd family — moved across the Mojave Desert to create a settlement at San Bernardino.

Henry Tanner: Joseph City Arizona Pioneer

My dad sent a link to a digitized copy of George S. Tanner's Henry Tanner: Joseph City Arizona Pioneer. You can download it here:

Henry Tanner: Joseph City Arizona Pioneer

Here's the first page:

And a random page with the end of one interesting story (found here), and two others in their entirety:

Tanner 9: Julia Ann Shepherd Tanner

9: Julia Ann Shepherd Tanner
b. 24 March 1829 Chagrin Township, Cuyahoga, Ohio
m. 1 December 1846 Winter Quarters (Florence), Douglas, Nebraska
d. 10 May 1899 Beaver, Beaver, Utah
Husband: Sidney Tanner
Father: Samuel Shepherd; Mother: Roxalana Ray

Julia Ann's parents were from Vermont.

Her father Samuel was a veteran of the War of 1812. He was a prisoner of war in Quebec. After the war he received a land grant in the Western Reserve as payout for his service, which he took in Chagrin Township, Cuyahoga (now Willoughby, Lake), Ohio (near Kirtland and Cleveland by Lake Erie).

Julia's mother was Roxalana Ray. Roxalana's name is a nod to classical history (the original Roxolana was the wife of the Sultan Suleiman the Lawgiver). Roxalana married Samuel in 1820 and they moved to Ohio in 1823. Samuel and Roxalana had eight children.

Living near Kirtland, they soon heard of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They joined it and started for Missouri. Roxalana and her infant son William Ray died of cholera while traveling on the Mississippi River.

When Samuel married widow Charity Bates Swarthout the next year he brought six children into the marriage: ages 13 (Sarah), 12 (Lucelia), 11 (Marcus), 8 (Fanny Jane), 6 (Julia Ann), and 5 (Rollins). Charity had seven children, aged 17 (Lucinda), 15 (George), 12 (Nathan), 9 (Truman), 7 (Hamilton), and 4 (twins Charles and Harley).

The Shepherd family followed the movements of the Mormons from Missouri to Illinois to Iowa.

At Winter Quarters in 1846, Julia Ann began helping in the Sidney Tanner family. Within the past year Sidney had lost his young son James in March, his wife Louisa to the "fever" on September 29, and his five-month-old son Mason on November 29. On December 1, Julia Ann and Sidney were married in "an extremely out in the country wedding, it having taken place at the Rushes above Florence, Nebraska," according to her son Henry. Henry also noted that, "though being newly wed and very young her wants were looked after by her husband who was a good provider."

Julia immediately had six step-children, Allen, who was two years younger than her, Lydia (14), Emma (11), Mary (9), Elsie (6), and Sidney C. (4). What an interesting family structure.

Julia's first child, Julia, was born in June 1848, shortly before they left for Utah. While crossing the plains, on July 26, 1848, her step-son Sidney C. fell out of the wagon and was crushed. The wagon train paused long enough to bury him and nail a marker to a tree before heading west again.

Julia and Sidney had eight children. The second was born in Little Cottonwood, Salt Lake, Utah. Their third child, our ancestor Henry Martin, was born in 1852 in San Bernardino. When the Saints were called from San Bernardino back to Utah, Julia once again made a pioneer journey trip with a tiny infant in her arms. She had her last child, Walter Waite, in 1863, at the age of 34.

Sidney and Julia were sealed in the Endowment House on 27 February 1851 before leaving for San Bernardino.

When they returned from San Bernardino to Utah, Julia's father Samuel and step-mother Charity, also returned but then quickly went back to California where they spent the rest of their lives. Other family members, Tanners and Shepherds, also remained in California, but other members of her family lived in Beaver, including her brother Marcus Lafayette Shepherd, who was mayor and stake president in Beaver.

Not much is known of Julia's life separate from that of Sidney. Her husband was married polygamously in 1859, ten days before the birth of their sixth child. Sidney was a very hard worker and was a freighter by profession, so he would have been gone frequently. Julia Ann would have spent many years keeping her own company (and that of all those children, of course). Julia and Sidney were married for 49 years. He died in 1895 and she died four years later in 1899.

The picture of the Kirtland Temple is from wikipedia and is in the public domain.

Sidney Tanner Biography

b. 1 April 1809 Greenwich, Washington, New York
m. 1 December 1846 near Florence, Nebraska
d. 5 December 1895 Beaver, Beaver, Utah
Wives: (1) Louisa Conlee, (2) Julia Ann Shepherd, (3) Rachel Neyman, (4) Mary Nickerson
Father: John Tanner; Mother: Lydia Stewart

The material this week is excerpted from Elizabeth DeBrouwer and George S. Tanner's book Sidney Tanner: His Ancestors and Descendants. I also found a good long history of the Tanner family online (click on the link).

A nice portrait of Sidney painted from his photo by Elizabeth DeBrouwer and available in the collections of the San Bernardino Public Library. There is also another picture there which may or may not be Sidney. I've looked at it carefully and can't decide any more than they can.

Little has come down to us of the early years of Sidney Tanner. He was born in Greenwich, New York, a village approximately forty miles southeast of Bolton Landing, the well-known home of the Tanners. His birth date is April 1, 1809 and his parents were John and Lydia Stewart Tanner. When the Tanner family moved to Lake George in 1818, Sidney was a boy of nine.

[Sidney had a half brother who was eight years older as well as two older brother and an older sister. His mother would eventually have eight more children.]

When John moved his large and growing family to the Lake George region, they settled in a wooded area north of Northwest Bay. Whether John acquired all his land at one time is not known, but eventually he owned 2,200 acres of timberland and two large farms.

To speak of John Tanner as a farmer needs some explanation, as the modest fortune he accumulated in a short while came mostly from the forest. We have no detailed information of his lumber operations, but we do know it was quite extensive and that he prospered from it.

...[T]he Tanner family would have been nearly independent for its food and clothing. This combination of a cash income from the sale of lumber products coupled with their own farm products which supplied the needs of the family soon raised them to a position of comparative wealth.

The improved financial condition of the family led to the desire for a larger and better home, and in 1823 John purchased or built the lovely home which is pictured in most publications about the Tanner family.

Sidney, who was nine years of age when the family moved to Northwest Bay in 1818, was fourteen when the home in Bolton Landing was acquired in 1823. In 1830, he would marry a girl from Greenwich which indicated that they were keeping up a correspondence with the home folks in Greenwich. Even after marriage, Sidney as well as other Tanner men would remain a member of the close-knit John Tanner family. A little glimpse into that family is given us by Nathan, a younger brother, in a speech he gave at a Tanner reunion in Payson in 1884.

"We were a hardy family and used to hardships. Our father commenced poor, after settling the affairs of a widowed family. He commenced poor and by hard work and economy accumulated around him the comforts of life. "He had a delightful home on the west side of Lake George. Here he carried on farming extensively; stockraising and dairying on different farms; lumbering in all its branches, as he owned sawmills and planing mills and owned some 2,200 acres of land with homes and barns to accomodate a number of families. He also kept a hotel of some considerable note. "In those days, women turned the wheel by hand or foot that spun our yarn and made our cloth. In this, we were not behind. We were a hardworking and hard-handed family. None of our means was willed to us but earned by hard work and economy."

Sidney chose for his wife Louisa Conlee, daughter of James and Elsie or Alcy (Cole) Conlee. We know very little about Louisa Conlee except a few statistics. She was born 5 February 1811, making her two years younger than Sidney. [They had eight children, the] three youngest of which died in the migration to the West, and she herself lost her life at the Missouri River.

When the Mormon elders, Simeon and Jared Carter, brought the gospel to the Tanner family in the fall of 1832 Sidney and Louisa joined the church along with other Tanner members. This was against the wishes of Louisa’s family in Greenwich, as we learned in a letter written to them by Sidney at the time of Louisa’s death. Louisa and Sidney seem to have been happy members of the large John Tanner family. They joined them in the movement of the family from Lake George to Kirtland, Ohio at Christmastime in 1834. The money John Tanner gave to the distressed church in Kirtland and loaned to the prophet and the building committee was money earned by the hardy Tanner family at Lake George. Sidney, John Joshua and Nathan have never been given credit for any of it, but they and the women who ran the spinning wheels and the looms were part owners of the gifts made by the generous John Tanner.

Sidney was present during the building of the Kirtland Temple and was one of those who “partook of the pentecostal outpourings” at the temple. He left with his family for Missouri earlier than John and his younger family in order to assist in building up Far West. Sidney and Nathan were in the Battle of Crooked River with David W. Patten, and he went through the persecutions of Missouri and was driven from that state into Illinois and spent a year at New Liberty. When the Tanners moved to the Nauvoo area, he joined with his father and his brother John Joshua in acquiring a large tract of land near Montrose, Iowa and began raising crops to assist the impoverished saints and to recoup their fortunes. In the six years they were there, they prospered and became “well fixed” again.

Sidney may have performed his greatest service to the church during the trouble in Missouri, the sojourn in Montrose and the trip to Utah. He has been described by one writer as a man “of marvelous constitutional powers.” He needed it during these trying years. He was thirty-one years of age when he came to Montrose and thirty-seven when they left for the West. These were times which tried men’s souls, and the Tanner men were brought up for just such times. They knew horses, mules and oxen and they knew how to keep a wagon and harness in repair. The six-year period of peace at Montrose permitted the whole family—John, Sidney, John Joshua and Nathan—to recover from the severe losses they had sustained in Ohio in rescuing the church from its involvement with the temple and the Kirtland bank. Consequently, when the church members began crossing the Mississippi River in early 1846 to the Iowa side, they found the Tanner larders filled and their hands extended....[Many details given.]

The Tanners were among the last to leave the Mississippi River, as so many needed help and they had so much to give. When they did leave, they had the best teams and the best “outfits.” Sidney is mentioned repeatedly as not being with his outfit, as he is out rescuing someone who is stuck in the mud or who has lost an ox or mule or who is without food.

Because of the compassionate service of John Tanner, Sidney Tanner and John Joshua Tanner, they were designated “bishops” by Brigham Young who had said that, if a man is willing that his property should be disposed of in any way the Lord directed, the Lord was willing he should be a bishop.

The pioneers arrived on the Missouri River too late to plant crops in 1846. But they remained there all of 1847. This was an immensely busy year and good crops of corn and garden truck were produced. When the main body of Saints left Winter Quarters in the spring of 1848 for the Salt Lake Valley, they were better equipped, provisioned and disciplined than they had been two years earlier; and the trip across the plains was less uneventful than the shorter trip across Iowa had been.

The loss of human life from the Mississippi to the Missouri was sobering and even on the plains this was to continue. To add to Sidney’s grief of the loss of two infants in Iowa, he mourned the death of his wife Louisa at Winter Quarters on the Missouri and later of his son Sidney C. in 1848 on the trip to Utah....

Sidney’s name appears more often in the journals and records during the two-year stay at Winter Quarters. “John Tanner, though still not old by present-day standards, is growing weary with he burdens of the outdoor life and is not well.” Sidney, the oldest son, moved in to fill the gap. Sidney is listed as the head of this or that group and in particular he managed the cattle of the camps.

Sidney’s second marriage took place near Florence (Winter Quarters), Nebraska. On December 1, 1846, he married Julia Ann Shepherd, daughter of Samuel and Roxey L. Shepherd. She was born March 24, 1829 and was twenty years younger than Sidney—moreover she had not yet reached her seventeenth birthday. The marriage turned out well in spite of the difference in their ages and the youthfulness of the bride. Sidney and Julia Ann became the parents of eight children, seven of whom grew to adulthood.

Most of the Tanner family reached the Salt Lake Valley in the autumn of 1848, including Sidney and his family. At the time of their arrival, besides Sidney, who was thirty-nine, and Julia Ann, who was nineteen, there were six children: Allen Benedict, aged seventeen; Lydia, sixteen; Emma, fourteen; Mary Louise, eleven; Elsie Elizabeth, eight; and Julia Ann, one.

Amasa Lyman and his party were assigned a square mile of land between the Cottonwood Creeks, which in present numbering is about [600 South and 1300 East], extending out toward the mountain to the east. It was rocky and sterile and hardly suitable for farming.

After two years in this location, permission came to Amasa Lyman and Charles C. Rich to lead a colony to a suitable location in California. Three of John’s sons, Albert, Myron and Seth, were already in California; and Sidney with his large family gladly joined the Lyman family and moved to California. By this date, 1851, Sidney’s oldest children were grown; Allen Benedict was twenty and Lydia was married. Sidney’s family was growing up.

Sidney was in the San Bernardino settlement between six and seven years. It was a busy time; because of Indian uneasiness, it was decided to build a fort. Sidney, against his own inclination, left his home and farm, which was some miles away, and united with the Saints in building the fort. When the uneasiness died down, he moved back to his large farm. Like his father before him, he liked lots of elbow room. But, since Sidney Tanner spent most of his time freighting, it would be interesting to know how he managed to run a farm. His son Allen Benedict was the only boy in the family old enough to have done farming, and he married the year they moved to San Bernardino.

Most of the stories about Sidney have to do with his freighting. He, with William Mathews, was on a freighting trip near the Mountain Meadows when the very regrettable massacre took place. Participants in the massacre halted their freight wagons, and they were not permitted to pass the scene in the daylight but were routed away from the scene by night. They carried the frightful news to San Bernardino.

Sidney seems to have been in charge of the large party which moved Apostles Lyman and Rich back to Utah at the time of their recall by Brigham Young. And it was Sidney Tanner who freighted the first pipe organ to Utah which had been donated to the Saints by the church members in Australia.

Sidney was one of the prominent men in the San Bernardino mission and he was usually a member of the County Commissioners and Stake High Council where he lived. But the freighting kept him away from home so much, he would hardly have been an ideal choice for a bishop or stake president.

When the call came from church leaders to vacate San Bernardino, Sidney Tanner dutifully gave up his holdings and returned to Utah, settling in Beaver. No doubt he, along with most of the settlers, did so reluctantly. ...

Beaver was a newly formed community, suitable for grazing, with timber potential. Sidney acquired a considerable acreage ... But his heart was in freighting and his lifestyle seems not to have changed much. His growing boys would have plenty of room for a variety of experiences on the farm, such as milking and caring for dairy cows, growing alfalfa and grain, as well as garden truck, and caring for sheep and hogs.

...Henry M. Tanner, the author’s father, seems never to have commented about his life on the Beaver farm, probably because he was never asked. We wait until those who have the information have passed on and then wish we had inquired more about them. My father did mention a trip he took with his father to California. The thing which impressed him most was a new way of starting a fire. One of the freighters took out his jackknife and shaved some kindling from a dry piece of wood he was carrying for the purpose, then reached into his pocket and pulled out a little box and drew out a match. This was the first match he had ever seen. The Tanners were using the flint and steel with the tinderbox to start their fires. This would have been sometime in the early or middle sixties.

Sidney took a third wife in Beaver in 1859. Her name was Rachel Neyman, daughter of William and Jane Neyman; Sidney was fifty and Rachel twenty-six. Rachel had been married previously. There were six children born to Sidney and Rachel, only two of whom grew to maturity and married.…

Sidney Tanner lived out the rest of his life in Beaver. He was a substantial citizen with financial holdings above average. He had interests in woolen mills, sawmills and cattle herds in addition to his farms. He was a counselor in the Ward Bishopric and later a member of the Stake High Council. In 1884, at a Tanner family gathering in Payson, he was called to be a patriarch to the Tanner family and the people of the Beaver area. He was seventy-five at the time and the apostle promised him he would have an additional ten years of life. He died in 1895 at the age of eighty-six and is buried in Beaver.

Sidney was the father of twenty-two, fourteen sons and eight daughters. Fourteen grew to maturity and married.…their descendants [were] estimated at about five thousand [in 1982].

Elizabeth DeBrouwer with George S. Tanner. Sidney Tanner: His Ancestors and Descendants. Salt Lake City, Utah: The Sidney Tanner Family Organization, 1982.
The photos are of Lake George, a wagon, San Bernardino in 1852, and the Beaver Courthouse. They were found on wikipedia and are all available for public use.