I got to visit with my grandma when I went to visit my family a few weeks ago, and she told me a little bit about her mother. Now, that side of the family, the Thomas family, is where I get some of my... well... quick-witted stubbornness. Whenever I think of people who lived way back when, I always imagine them as sweet, mild-mannered, soft-spoken ladies and gentlemen straight out of a BBC film. But apparently they were normal people who thought for themselves.
Before my grandma was born, her mom lived in Colonia Juarez, Mexico, with six children. She had a newborn baby, 2-year-old twins, a 3, 5, and 7 year old. Oh, and here's the fun part. She lived in Mexico with the six kids, and her husband lived up in Colorado with his other wife. The first wife had been in Mexico a couple years before, but she'd returned to Colorado once they had a house ready. My great-grandma was waiting for her house to be built/set up, but apparently it just wasn't getting done. Out of sight, out of mind, and all that.
So that winter, which was in 1911/1912, she got sick of it. She didn't get a lot of support there from her husband, and I read on wikipedia that the Mexican Revolution had started in 1910, so that would make anyone uneasy.
She bought a train ticket, and because kids rode for free, she packed up her six kids and went home. Since she hadn't told her husband she was coming, she went and stayed with her mother.
Now that she was in town, my great-grandfather felt it more pressing to build her a house, so soon she had a house for her little family. That's where my grandma was eventually born, making her the eleventh out of twelve children.
We got to talking about this because we were saying how ridiculous it is that Americans nowadays feel like they need mansions just to fit them and their two children, plus a craft room, den, living room, family room, dining room, and day spa. In my grandma's little house, there were just two upstairs rooms for the kids: the boys' room and the girls' room. She said that once the older ones had moved out, she got to move into the next room, and she and her sister had their own rooms. And they did argue and yell a little less when everyone had more room.
So there's a little random bit of my family's history. I'm still a little confused about one part: the Church officially discontinued polygamy in 1890, but my great-grandparents were married in 1903. The wikipedia article talks about how the church officially ended polygamy in 1890 and then really REALLY ended it in 1904. Sounds like my family fits in to that gray area there.
Monday, November 17, 2008
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2 comments:
Wow. I just read a book called Mormons and Polygamy on Saturday. So here's the deal: The first manifesto was given in 1980. It ended the "general" practice of taking more wives. But, for various reasons, like a barren first wife, or someone you happened to have been engaged to before the manifesto, you could get married if you went to Mexico. There was this guy in Mexico who would marry them. And then there were some marriages happening in the US. You have to think about what they were giving up when they outlawed polygamy. They believed that they would get much more blessings by living it and some people (including women) had grown up wanting to partake in those blessings. Since there was no penalty, it was seen as ok as long as you didn't get caught by the government.
But President Joseph F. Smith had to testify about it in a trial to allow Reed Smoot to serve in the US Senate. That was where he realized that the first manifesto wasn't quite strong enough. So he gave the 2nd manifesto which added the punishment of excommunication for anyone entering or allowing someone to enter into polygamy. Of course, since the punishment wasn't in the first manifesto, all those people who had been married between 1890 and 1904 got grandfathered in, so they didn't have to separate, but because they had gotten married while the statement from President Wilford Woodruff was in effect, they weren't allowed to hold positions in the church where the members would have to sustain them.
In case anyone is curious, I got this information from a little book called Mormons & Polygamy, Setting the Record Straight by Jessie L. Embry. She talks about research that she has done on the subject and is extremely informative with intense amounts of footnotes (bibliography).
Can't really follow a comment like that!
But all very interesting. We decendents of polygamy must stick together.
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