Robert
and Elizabeth Faddis, JW Neil
Student
Ward Final Draft (by “a cousin”)
Brothers and sisters, I’ve been
asked to talk this afternoon about genealogy. Well, as a recent
vice-presidential candidate said when confronted with the need for specifics, quote
“I’m not going to talk about that.” End quote. However I am going to talk about
things related, and maybe a little genealogy and if you’re patient it will all
come together in the end.
Let’s start with a confession.
I’ve sworn never to do genealogy. That was for old women. And it was time and
brain intensive and the costs outweighed the benefits and it was boring. But
sometimes younger women did it. My husband had a really great cousin – smart,
funny, I liked her. And she was really into
genealogy and was constantly
running down to the Family History Library and trying to get everybody excited
about it. And I used to look at her and think: “You’re sweet, but unbalanced,
and really need get a life of your own.” But then, something happened:
I got scared into writing
family history – note the distinction: history, not genealogy – and it was all
an accident. One day in 2004 my husband and I accidentally drove the scenic
route past Mirror Lake into western Wyoming. And being there, and out of sheer
boredom, we looked for a town near Evanston where I thought some of my
relatives had been miners. The town was gone. We drove east to look at Oakley
where my father had been born, but it was also gone. And we drove south about 20 miles to
where my grandmother had been postmistress in Cumberland. Also gone. Three
towns in Wyoming gone forever, Another in Utah.
Four family homes and four
family towns lost. No walls or parts of walls or porch steps. There was one
chimney and a few bottle shards. But mostly but just sage and dust. I felt I
needed to do something, but it wasn’t the spirit of Elijah that moved me --
more like the Endangered Species Act.
All of the people who lived in
those towns had been dead 50 to 100 years or more. I knew their names; their
ordinance work was all done, and the family lines were pushed back as far as
they would push. So what was the point?
The point for me was I wanted to know
them before every scrap of evidence that they’d ever been alive disappeared. If
entire towns can evaporate in 50 years, what else might be lost? I wanted to
know where my people lived and how they lived and why. I wanted to rescue their
mortal lives, so to speak. To bring them back to life in a family history so my
children and grandchildren would know them – really know them. The problem was
they’d left no clues: no letters, no journals, no personal records. Instead,
they were just names on group sheets and pedigree charts. Poor immigrant
laborers who’d become obscure.
I talked with every descendent
I could find, and they knew even less than I did. All I got were family legends
that I already knew. For example: Great Grandfather Robert was killed when a
mine roof fell on him. Great Grandmother Elizabeth had such a bad heart that
you could see pounding under her blouse from 10 feet away. Their little boy was
killed by a train. That’s
all most of my cousins had to tell. I had a little more plus lots of birth and
death dates and a few photos. So, I put the group sheets on one side of the
computer, opened up Ancestry. Com, and got to work.
First I looked for my great
grandfather, Robert Faddies, in the 1880 Utah census. He turned up twice, a bad
sign. In Summit County, Robert was found in the Coalville home of his mother,
Elizabeth Faddies. She was listed as head of house. But in
Ogden,Robert was listed as
head of that house and living with his wife,
Elizabeth Faddies.
Next, I tried to find their son
who’d been killed. I wrote the archivist at the Ogden library and asked if
there was a newspaper story. She fired back with a long and lurid article from
the Ogden Standard Examiner for June 15, 1880. It was
accurately titled “Horrible! Horrible!” Here’s a much toned-down summary:
Samuel Faddies, aged 6, was run over late afternoon by an engine in the Ogden
Railroad Yards. His mother lives in a small house by the tracks. His father
used to work for the railroad but now mines coal in Summit County. The boy’s
older sister, with him at the time, said he tried to climb on the moving train
but fell.
The group sheet told me that the
sister who went out with the boy was only eight years old and there were two
younger sisters: a three-year-old and a newborn. Now the family was more than
just names on a page. Now this scene emerged: It was close to dinner time that
day in June – maybe hot. The family lived right by the railroad yards where
there is no green space, no open water. No place to hide from the sun. Just
soot and ashes and the rails reflecting the heat. Great grandmother (with the
bad heart) had apparently been alone for many days while her husband was with
his mother in Coalville. He’d left her with three youngsters plus a baby to
care for. Wouldn’t a new mother with a bad heart be hot and tired? Wouldn’t the
children be restless and hungry? Maybe the six-year-old boy, bursting with
energy, slipped out or was sent outside with his older sister.
Now I could see the small house
by the tracks, hear the noise of metal grinding on metal, the whistles, bells,
the hiss of steam, the screeching brakes. I could see the house shiver with the
power of the engines. See the coupling and uncoupling of cars. See the boy’s
excitement. See the girl – only eight -- try to control the boy. But she
couldn’t.
Week by week I learned a little
more. Their lives grew fuller. That mother with the bad heart died two years
later, in 1882, after giving birth to my grandmother. Robert was killed three
years later, in 1885, leaving four orphan daughters, ages three to thirteen.
Where would they live? How would they live? They invaded my thoughts and my sleep.
In doing more research, I learned that two very old grandmothers – Robert’s
mother, born in Ireland, and Elizabeth’s mother, born in Scotland --, took two
of the girls. Another went to live with an aunt
The oldest – the eight-year old
who hadn’t been able to keep her brother off the train – had already been
earning some money. At 13 she became a full-time hired girl in Evanston and
later went with Senator Clark’s family to Washington D.C. where she cared for
their children and house. By 1900, that oldest girl – then 28 – and the
youngest girl -- (my grandmother) then 18 -- were living in adjacent houses in
Ogden, Utah. And the census identified both as “household servants.”
Household servants. No glitzy
“nanny” business for orphans. They washed other people’s heavy woolens and
cottons on a washboard every Monday. Hung the clothes out to dry, year around.
Made pot roast every Tuesday when the coal stove would be hot for the irons and
ironing. Scrubbed the wooden floors every night, sometimes using bleach – sometimes
sand – to scour them white. Cared for children not their own. Sat up nights
with measles and scarlet fever, mumps and whooping cough.
Thirty-four years later, those
two household servants, my grandma then married and her sister still an “old
maid”, took me home from the hospital after my own mother died in childbirth.
For 18 years I grew up in their home, but still learned more about them after
they were dead than when I’d lived, self-absorbed, with them. The same for my
grandfather. I knew he had built Ideal Beach at Bear Lake but had no idea he’d
had a hardware and mercantile store in Kemmerer that sold everything from milk
pails to bicycles, coffins to pianos. You get to be a one-man-band in a little
town.
I hadn’t asked, but why had no
one given me these stories. I had to find them in old newspapers on microfilm.
And the more I learned the more I wanted to know. I couldn’t stop thinking of
them or their parents and the rest of the family. They invaded my nights, kept
me awake, slipped into my dreams. I learned to love them and love them deeply.
By day I poured over the records. And the more I learned, the more I grew
to love the work, also.
There are so many places
to learn about your ancestors – the people who made your own life possible:
There are tax rolls, military rolls, court records, wills, rent books, wage
books, poor house rolls, guild records, ships’ manifests, immigration records,
news papers, government documents. I found my grandfather four years ago in the
Congressional Record. From 1919 to 1921 Senator Reed Smoot repeatedly
introduced a bill called the J. W. Neil Relief Act designed to compensate
grandpa for losing his fortune when the government mistakenly seized his
shipment of sugar and held it until the price of sugar bottomed out. Bad
mistake. He finally got a
little money back and gave it all to the bank that had lent him credit to buy
the sugar.
There are ordinance surveys to
check. Once the British controlled Northern Ireland they sent in the army corps
of engineers to measure and count everything including the economic and living
conditions. And old parish records are wonderful. For centuries many churches
kept records of their members and their weddings, baptisms, disciplinary action
and the like. Then in 1785 John Sinclair, General Secretary of the Church of
Scotland, directed all the ministers the Established (or Presbyterian) Church
to write an account of the geology, hydrology, antiquities, economic and social
conditions of each of their parishes. Some wrote 2 paragraphs and some wrote
200 pages. Taken together, it’s the best overview of Scottish history of the
period ever produced and surely made my own work easier
And the work was going well.
Sort of out of the blue I met the editor of a tiny Wyoming newspaper who’d recently
written about my grandfather. What a co-incidence!!!. That editor introduced me
to old Paul Canoso in Diamondville who had known two of my great uncles 60
years ago. Paul introduced me to 92-year-old Alice who’d gone with her husband
to work in my grandfather’s mine. She included the mine in a book she’d just
finished writing.
In the Family History Library I
met a missionary named Faddies (Robert’s name, also). That man’s ancestors
lived in the same tiny village of 300 people in County Antrim. Ireland, when
Robert was born there. Time after
time, without plan or
preparation, I’d come on the right paper or book or person to answer a
question. It all seemed extremely convenient and lucky and circumstantial.
Then in May of 2007, a grandson
wrote me about a spiritual experience concerning my mother – a woman I’d never
seen. He broke my heart. That month we took our children on a family history
trip. In Ireland we called unannounced at the local parish to talk with the
minister, but he was away for the day. But before we could leave, he showed up
– having forgotten something – and stayed for over an hour answering questions
and telling stories. He also told us how to find the old laborers’ cottages we
wanted to see by following a path that he’d had cut through some over growth
just the night before. We wouldn’t have been able to walk that path until that
very morning.
A woman whose cottage we
rented just happened to have an out-of-print copy of a small parish history –
about the same as a stake history – for the 19th century. Just happened to have it and
her son just happened to have a photo copy machine for the pages I wanted
In Scotland a golf pro gave me
a tattered postcard from his bulletin board that showed land where my ancestors
had lived and mined coal. And now, picture this: We drove into a little
Scottish town where my grandfather had been born. In 1881 there would have been
smoke stacks, smelters, and ponds for the iron works. Mine openings, tipples,
slag heaps. The miners’ row houses. But in 2007 there was none of that. Just a
beautiful countryside with clean row houses and a short main street.
When we saw two people walk out
of a pub, we pulled the car over and I asked them how I could learn the layout
of the town 150 years earlier. The woman suggested we have a drink with her
husband in the pub, and she’d be right back. So we stood talking on the
sidewalk until she returned with paper rolled up like a map. Which it was. A
map of the village in 1860, a little before my grandfather was born. Perfect.
And when I asked if I might photocopy it, she said “No, it’s yours. Keep it.”
Brothers and sisters, you don’t
have to travel 6,000 miles to meet helpful people. There’s a website for the
United Kingdom called Genes Reunited, kind of like Face Book for dead people.
If you actually have a photo, so much the better; but there weren’t many photos
taken in 1800 or earlier. So all you really have to do is register, type in an
ancestor’s name and maybe a bit of information like their birth date or birth
place. And then the soft ware program matches names and dates and pretty soon
you get email saying your ancestor has been matched with one or two or twenty
other dead people and do you want to check those others out?
This checking is the hard part
for me. I open up those matches, some lead into family trees, and there it all
is: truck and branches and smaller branches and even smaller branches with all
the spouses and children and grandchildren and lateral relatives -- names and
dates expanding exponentially. And I try to navigate around in that maze of
people and numbers and look in vain for the help prompts and the review icons
and even the cancel or escape buttons. But in my fumbling way I’ve found dozens
of cousins and correspond with some.
There’s cousin Bev in Australia
(we have a common ancestor who immigrated to New South Wales). And I have
cousin Gina in England, whose great, great grandfather – my great, great uncle
--, told the family he was born in a Scottish mining camp called “Mud Hole.”
And I have cousin Colin in Scotland who has apparently plain-out fabricated a
birth place and marriage for our common great-great-great grandfather just so
he could get the temple work done. Cousin Colin has yet to provide me with any
documentation to support his work.
On the other hand, many of the
great uncles and great aunts and their children and spouses that I find have
not had ordinance work done. For them I make temple cards, and my family joins
me in the baptisms and sealings. So there are collateral blessings to writing
family history. Unintended consequences. Genealogy. Temple work.
You won’t appreciate that last
until you hear this final story: I’m seventy-five years old; and for more than
half that time, I’ve been inactive in the church, and for almost all of it,
I’ve felt doubt and disbelief. Disbelief in a heavenly father, or brother, or
comforter. Mine was a different path until I started writing family history. On
that trip to Scotland, I finally had to admit that I was being helped
in my research. Greatly, enormously helped. There were too many coincidences,
too much good luck, too many times my heart had broken as I learned about my
people. Too many times I had been shaken by a spirit I didn’t recognize. And
then there was the message from my grandson.
I understand now that grace and
goodness have walked with me this whole family search and before. Been with me
without my asking, without my deserving. Others had asked for me. Had prayed
for me when I hadn’t prayed. Had faith for me when I had none. Had lived sweet
spiritual lives right beside me. Certainly
my husband and children. Likely others, seen and unseen.
For me, the greatest unintended
consequence of doing family history has been greater joy. Increased hope for
human kind, greater faith in a divine presence, greater activity in the church.
A greater sense of love and being loved. Of being forgiven. Of being turned
toward an even fuller understanding.
I’m not there yet. Not where
most of you are. Some people bear a testimony of the Book of Mormon. Some of Joseph Smith. Some of
missionary work. Most that the Church is true. And most say I know – I know beyond the shadow
of a doubt. I don’t say I
“know” much of anything. To know – to have real knowledge of what is -- that’s
a lot for me. However, I can talk about belief and hope. So the testimony I
leave with you is this:
Believe in the spirit of
Elijah. Your real father and mother are not a bad place to start. Ask them for
some of their happiest memories, some of the worst, the turning points. You
might be surprised. You might develop more compassion, more love and respect.
And you might learn quite a bit about yourself, too. Write it all down; you’ll
want it some day. Then move back in time. It’s interesting. A giant human
puzzle. Even more, if you turn your hearts to your fathers and mothers, I
believe YOU will be blessed by unintended consequences of magnificent
proportions. For this is the work of the Greater Father, whose name you know.
And I so testify in the name of His beloved son, Jesus Christ, Amen.
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