George Jarvis Files the Claim to His City Lot

As I mentioned, I'm reading the Washington County Probate Court Records. While waiting for some other scanned pages to save to my thumb drive yesterday evening, I scrolled ahead in the microfilm and saw this item. All the townspeople had to file claim to their lots with the government. George Jarvis did so on June 5, 1871.

The record notes:

George Jarvis, Sworn, Says, he drew Lot number Six (6) in Block Number Two (2), official map, plat A, From the City, ten years ago. 

Was the first man who moved with his family on the City plot after the lots were given out. Has resided on said lot No. Six, Block Two, with his family ever Since.

Here's a bit of the Pioneer Map of St. George showing the Jarvis lot, situated as it is partway between the Tabernacle and the Temple. The Jarvis home is, of course, no longer there.

Each block was 32 rods square, and each lot was 8x16 rods, or 132 ft x 264 ft, equalling .8 acres per lot. The blocks were separated by streets 90 feet wide.

Here is a picture of the Jarvis home in St. George. There was previously a porch, and the traces of it can still be seen. It looks like it was a small brick or adobe house with a lean-to on the right. The family surrounded the home with vegetable and flower gardens and trees.

And here is a picture of old St. George. The Tabernacle is in the bottom center.

Sources

"Jarvis Home in St. George, Porch Removed," as found at George and Ann Prior Jarvis Family Website, courtesy of Ellen Raye.

Miller, Albert E., J. B. Ireland, Nicholas G. Morgan, et al., "Pioneer Map City of St. George, Washington County–Utah." Salt Lake City, Utah: n.d. As found at George and Ann Prior Jarvis Family Website.

"St. George, Utah," as found in Margaret Godfrey Jarvis Overson. George Jarvis and Joseph George De Friez Genealogy. Mesa, Arizona: M. J. Overson, 1957.

Washington County, Utah Probate Court Records, FHL Film 484838, Book B, 253-254.

Guest Posting Today: “Lives of Ancestors All Remind Us”: Family History Books

Today's effort to get over this month-long wheezy cold and get back on track with all my projects is a guest post at Keepapitchinin:

“Lives of Ancestors All Remind Us”: Family History Books

The title is a reference to an anonymous little poem found in Will Pettit's Pettit Peregrinations:

Lives of ancestors all remind us,
We leave pictures to our kin,
And departing leave behind us,
Relatives who point and grin.

The post is about the resources available through FamilySearch's amazing collection, Family History Books.

New School Year Starts ... Projects Resume

With the children in school, it's time to get back to work. Right now my top projects are:

The Eminent Women of the St. George Temple

The Eminent Women project is very busy right now. I'm processing dozens of family histories from the kind ladies at the Washington County DUP and will also start reading the Washington County court records as soon as the microfilms reach my regional Family History Center. The current women are:

• Caroline Blake Hardy / Jane Mary Nugent Burke
• Elizabeth Reeves Liston / Dolley Payne Todd Madison
• Sarah Leaver Lewis Griffin / Anne Isabella Milbanke, Baroness Byron
• Catherine Donald Rankin Pymm / Abigail Smith Adams

Perhaps someday I'll keep a record, but I would guess that I spend at least 40 or 50 hours on each biography.

I will not post any more biographies until after I read the court records, because I hope that they will solve some mysteries about some of the upcoming women.

A short biography of Rose Ellen "Ella" Bywater Valentine

This is a chapter for an ongoing series of biographies of Mormon women. Ella Bywater Valentine was the first woman dentist in Utah and the head of the Relief Society in the Swiss-German Mission, where she had accompanied her husband who served twice as mission president in the German-speaking countries. She left a charming memoir. I have been in touch with several of her cousins, but have had difficulty contacting any of the few descendants of her two adopted children to get permission to use a picture.

Additional Projects

• I'm rewriting the Wikipedia article on HLHS, since it's pretty bad. I've already fixed a thing or two, but it needs extensive work. I'm currently working on the second section, "Causes," reading articles and books on the subject and reviewing the latest medical studies.
• I have another project in mind that I won't mention now, since I'm trying to decide how much time and energy to devote to it.
• Current projects at TheAncestorFiles include posting David Nathan Thomas's history, the history of the Southern States Mission, and Swedish family research. I also need to survey my father's amazing genealogical collection that's sitting behind my computer on a hard drive, and post as much content as I can.
• Every now and then I do a little work on the history of the black slaves and former slaves and slaveholding families of Utah Territory.
• And then there are the other things: family and church responsibilities, home renovation and maintenance projects, etc. I mention these last but they really take up most of my time and energy.

Life's busy, and it's good, but there are many, many things to do, and not quite enough time to do them all. In other words, I won't be posting too much here until I get caught up on the Eminent Women and Valentine projects, but eventually I'll finish the current backlog and resume posting more material.

John Morgan and Joseph Standing Mission (1876)

Don't miss Bessie's series at Ancestral Ties about John Morgan and Joseph Standing's mission travels:

• January 11, 1881
• April 9-13, 1876
• April 14-18, 1876
• April 19-23, 1876

The first linked post also contains links to her other posts about the two men.

* * *

Additional note: John Morgan didn't ever seem to go by the name "John Hamilton Morgan" or "John H. Morgan." I have only looked at about a dozen vital records, but one of the first pages of The Life and Ministry of John Morgan notes that he may have been christened as "John Hamilton Morgan." No proof is given, though, so I am considering switching over the labels on my posts about John Morgan to reflect the name he used throughout his life. 

However, the "Hamilton" name can be useful in distinguishing him from thousands of other John Morgans, as in the case of his Wikipedia article, so I'm really of a mixed mind about this.

A similar case of a similar era involves the Apostle Erastus Snow. After his death, some people started calling him Erastus Fairbanks Snow since he seems to have been named after Erastus Fairbanks, but his family has been making an effort in recent years to stamp out the use of the extra middle name.

Another case involves George Jarvis. At some point many years after his death, someone called him "George Franklin Jarvis" somewhere and the use of the false middle name spread like wildfire. I'm still trying to put that one out. Here's the post I've written about it. [Did George Jarvis Have a Middle Name? No.] My dad put a link to the post in George's FamilySearch Family Tree entry, and so far no one has tried to change his name back.

Theoretically I could give John Morgan the same treatment, but there are too many more pressing items on my to-do list, so I'll just have to raise the question here and then leave it.

Genealogy Help for United Kingdom Research

Miles Brown, a Cripps/Baker cousin in England, just put up an excellent post on his family blog about ordering a family record from Belgium. He couldn't read the record, so he submitted it to a website called Rootschat. Rootschat is a self-described "rather friendly totally free family history forum" dedicated to providing help for family research questions. This is a resource I'll need to remember for any questions I have regarding United Kingdom sources.

The Blue Jarvis-DeFriez Book: Exciting News from FamilySearch Family Books

If you're not familiar with FamilySearch Family History Books, you may want to familiarize yourself with this amazing resource. Family History Books.

As my father noted yesterday, FamilySearch now has more than 100,000 family history books and collections available in this digital collection. Many Americans who have ancestry in America going back at least a few generations should be able to find resources on at least one family line: diaries, family history books, local histories, collections of letters. The collection is extensive and amazing.

One item of particular interest that FamilySearch just added is Grandma Margaret Overson's blue Jarvis-DeFriez history. My father inherited the original copyright, so he signed a copyright release, and now anyone can download all 710 pages of family stories and pictures. Here is a link to the downloadable pdf:

Overson, Margaret Godfrey Jarvis. George Jarvis And Joseph George De Friez Genealogy. Mesa, Arizona: Margaret J. Overson, 1957.

Note, 9/2/13: the link doesn't seem to work. Go to the link for Family History Books and type in "Margaret Overson" to see or download the book.

A Note on the Sources for the Lorenzo Snow "Windows of Heaven" Story

In the post about Ann Prior Jarvis's account of Lorenzo Snow's 1899 visit to St. George, I mentioned that I had a question about the sources for the story. 

I am serving in the Young Women organization of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, so I do not attend the adult classes and I have not kept up with reading the lesson manual for the adult classes. This evening I looked at this year's manual, which is Teachings of Presidents of the Church: Lorenzo Snow. A recent lesson was Chapter 12: "Tithing, a Law for Our Protection and Advancement." The lesson — undoubtedly due to the excellent staff at the Church History Library — thoroughly sources the entire story. The list of sources includes the two newspaper articles shown here.

Deseret Evening News, "In Juab and Millard Stakes," May 29, 1899, 5.

Deseret Evening News, "Pres. Snow in Sunny St. George," May 17, 1899. 2.

The second article includes a name I couldn't decipher in Ann's account, so I fixed that in the previous post.

George and Ann Prior Jarvis and "The Windows of Heaven"

Last week my family and I visited St. George, Utah. We had an enjoyable time seeing the Temple, the Tabernacle, Brigham Young's Winter Home, the Jacob Hamblin Home in Santa Clara, the red bluffs overlooking the city, and the site of the Jarvis home, now apartment buildings.

Visting the Tabernacle was curious for two reasons. 

First, George and Ann Prior Jarvis's youngest child, "Willie" was killed by lightning on the front steps of the Tabernacle on April 5, 1881. It was a great and lasting tragedy for the family. They lived a couple of blocks from the Tabernacle and attended meetings there the rest of their lives, so their memories of the event would have had changing meanings throughout their lives.

Second, walking into the Tabernacle was like walking into the set of the movie "The Windows of Heaven," since part of the movie was filmed in the Tabernacle. Here is a short version of the movie, to see the renovations done since the movie was filmed. (Skip ahead to about 10:15 for the Tabernacle footage.) Most obviously, the paint has been stripped from the woodwork and the interior changed from blue to yellow.

Just today I saw a discussion online about tithing and I wondered about the historical sources for the story presented in "The Windows of Heaven." A quick Google search found that one of the first places to find information is on the George and Ann Prior Jarvis Family website page, "Pres. Snow's St. George revelation on tithing." The page mostly consists of LeRoi Snow's account of the story, but the webmaster also included this note:

Note: This story is included here because of its importance in church history, it happened in St. George, and it seems reasonable to assume that George and Ann and members of their family were present in the St. George Tabernacle when it occurred.

Were George and Ann Jarvis there? How would we know? Attendance rolls were not kept for meetings like that. We would only know if one of the family members kept a diary. Once of the family members did, but by 1899, Ann Prior Jarvis had been in very poor health for many years and her diary keeping had become rather sketchy. I will pull it up and see if she recorded anything.

Here is the page, and she does have an entry for May 17, 1899, the day the conference began.

Here is a transcription of the entire page.

1899
Jan
I had a letter from my Sister
I answered it and sent her
Maggies Photo and Alberts Photo
Sister Brown has died
I received a letter from my Sister
May 17
We have the Apostles and [Presiding] Bishop [William B.] Preston, Seymour B Young and many others at Saint George  I went to meeting one day and it was a pleasant change and a treat for me. I heard Lorenzo Snow talk his son LeRoy, Bishop Preston, [William B. Dougall], Br [Abraham O.] Woodruff, Joseph F Smith. Their discourses were on Tithing.
We thank the[e] Oh God for a Prophet.
I have had a letter from [granddaughter] Maud Jarvis and her Card
Weather Cool and Windy Sister Sylvester paid me a visit on Saterday
Heber [and Susan Smith Jarvis] had a Son born on the 22 of Sep. 1898
Named him William Prior. We the good people of St George had the Brethren from S L C
I went one day to Listen to their Instruction
I felt grieved I missed any meetings
[May] 21
I went on Sunday and partook of the Sacrement of the Lord. And went to Em Cottam's they had a party I suffered very much coming home. They tell me it is seven years since I was there before I was glad to see them so comfortable
Br Lytle was the Speaker on Sunday
Rose Mother Sylvester Miss Walker and many more has gone to S L City.
July
Sister Larson died Owen Woodbury died several young Children died I had letters from St. Johns and answered them

So that answers the question. Yes, Ann and undoubtedly other family members were present at the historic conference. Ann seems to have attended meetings on Wednesday, May 17, and Sunday, May 21. Her line "We thank the[e] Oh God for a Prophet" is her usual laconic way of commenting on the historical nature of the conference. Even in better years she would not have said much more.

[See also: A Note on the Sources for the Lorenzo Snow "Windows of Heaven" Story]

Garrard and Eliza Morgan's Children [Updated...Again]

This post is from September 8, 2009. My father just sent a question about the 1880 Census, since Luella's name is transcribed "Love" in online resources although the census taker wrote her name as "Loue." Besides adding the 1870 and 1880 Census to this post, there are a number of different resources that have been found on the Morgan family since I put up this post in 2009, many due to the ongoing efforts of Morgan cousins Bessie at Ancestral Ties and Karen Matthews. See Ancestral Ties or Ancestry.com for more information.

* * *

In an 1863 letter home to his mother during his Civil War service, John mentions several of his brothers and sisters:

I get letters frequently from Will. Reced one from Lu[ella] last evning also one from Morg [Perhaps Morg Hamilton buried in South Park Cemetery in Greensburg, Indiana]. Kiss Jap for me. [His dog?] I would give a thousand dollars to see. Is Lon [Leonidas] studying any now. Tell him to improve his time above everything else. Let novels and such trash alone. Let him have something solid and something that will give him information to read. Knowledge is more than gold and silver. Poor Jimmie. I am sorry his jaw troubles him yet. He is a good boy and has the go aheaditiveness about him to make a man of himself one that will make his mark.

Southern States Mission Manuscript History

For anyone interested in the history of the Southern States Mission, the Church History Library recently digitized the Southern States Mission Manuscript History. Here is a link to each part of the collection, compiled by Bruce at Amateur Mormon Historian.

Southern States Mission Manuscript History