Family stories are vital to future generations

My father was born 100 years ago at Uintah, a small community south of Ogden. The house still stands along Combe Road.

Hundreds of stories came from that small community. Such stories are important if future generations are to understand their past. Many tales are lost because no one bothered to write them down, record them, or pass them on.

Dad told about his mother going to a nearby stream to catch trout for breakfast. She wrote about the crickets floating down the Weber River in huge brown masses and crawling into every corner of every house. They had to shake the bedding before bed time. Grandma could do anything. She was widowed young, then raised a second family of two grandsons. One became a doctor in Ogden. The other became a physicist. When Grandma was 75, she wanted central heat in her Willard home. She crawled under the house to dig a stand-up basement for the furnace, using a hand shovel and a coal bucket to remove the dirt. She first drove a car in her 80s. She milked a dozen cows twice a day, raised a mentally limited son, helped a daughter struggle through the tragic deaths of two husbands and debilitating depression, had little desire to accumulate things or travel to distant places -- and never complained.

As the end of life approached at age 96, she said: "Don, all I ever needed to make me happy were a few seeds, some fertile ground and running water."

When I visit her grave in Uintah, I see the obelisk marking the grave of E.O. Wattis. The Wattis brothers started Utah Construction Co. and helped make fortunes for the Eccles, the Dees, the Dumkes and others. My great-grandmother came west with the Wattis family. She helped raise the Wattis youngsters. Every year at Christmas she knit woolen mittens to send the Wattis "boys" at their San Francisco offices. When she died, E.O. Wattis came back to Uintah to speak at her funeral.

I remember, too, stories Dad told about my great-great- grandfather, Benjamin Franklin Stoddard. He couldn't write, and so we don't know much about him. He signed his marriage license with an "X." Too many early Utahns couldn't write, or didn't write, or couldn't find writing materials. (Paper was scarce.) And too many family survivors discarded, burned or misplaced priceless written records.

When my grandmother died, she left a tattered wallet belonging to Benjamin Franklin Stoddard. It contained a picture of a sailing ship and a receipt from a gunsmith in Iowa for $50 in gold dust. We knew B.F. Stoddard went to California on a "gold mission." We deduced that he returned to Utah via the long but popular route through Central America. The Sierra Nevadas were dangerous and difficult to cross -- impossible in winter. Those with the time and resources preferred to sail down the coast to the isthmus (now Panama), walk across that narrow neck of land, catch another ship to New Orleans, travel up the Mississippi to St. Louis or Davenport, and hitch a wagon ride West.

Great-great-granddad Stoddard stopped in Iowa to buy a muzzle- loading shotgun. The gun is still in the family -- the name of the gunsmith on its barrel.

Those two brilliant grandsons my grandmother raised used the 16- pound gun for a pry bar, but Dad painstakingly restored it.

Uintah was also the site of the so-called "Morrisite War." Brigham Young sent a small army north to quell an uprising. The battle was short, and the Morrisites fled to Idaho. Farmers in Uintah unearthed cannonballs as late as 1950. When I asked my grandmother about it, she changed the subject.

Every family has stories such as this, whether the family is from pioneer stock or recently arrived. Write them down. Make them part of the family record. Use as many specific dates, names and documents as you can. And by all means, see that a university library or historian gets a copy.

Such stories will be as valuable to historians 100 years from now as the stories from a century ago passed on by my father, my grandmother, and that tattered old wallet of Ben Stoddard's.

G. Donald Gale is president of Words, Words, Words, Inc. He was formerly editorial director at KSL. He earned a Ph.D. at the University of Utah and was awarded an honorary doctorate by Southern Utah University. E-mail: dongale@words3.com

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