William Buckminster Lindsay Sr.

In last week’s post, about Soren Peter Guhl, I probably placed too much emphasis on his penchant for peculiarity. But I think the more we know about people, the more individual traits emerge, and the more their personalities become distinct. This is the thing I like best about looking back into our family history; as cousin Kathleen (Henderson) Wheeler once told me, referring to our Grandmother Mary Anne (McIntosh) Henderson: “I can’t wait to meet her” in the hereafter. Indeed.

I feel that way about many of my ancestors, not the least of which is William Buckminster Lindsay, Sr. Most of what I know about him comes via the Web site http://wardell-family.org/wb_lindsay_sr.htm. The original work was written by Rex B. Lindsay, and later “Edited and Expanded By: David J. Wardell (1990).” Some years back, I e-mailed David Wardell, and he gave me permission to copy and paste, with proper credit, the text onto the Henderson Reunion site.

Much of W.B. Lindsay Sr.’s life can be traced according to his membership in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. (Good record keepers, we Mormons.) But the Wardells flesh out the story plenty from there. WBL was born in Vermont in 1797, one of 10 children in the family of Ephraim Lindsay and Mercy Willey. Interestingly, Ephraim was a Revolutionary War veteran. They moved to Canada while WBL was a child, and he later bought land there – the Wardells even identify the lot.

William Sr. married Sarah Myres, and they had eight children. According to the Wardells’ history:

“One history places the family in Galena, Jo Daviess County, Illinois, in 1839 which is just across the border from Southern Wisconsin. The 1840 territorial census of Wisconsin places the family in Eastern Iowa County, Wisconsin. In this census one member of the family is shown as employed in agriculture and another adult male is shown employed in mining.”

In 1841, WBL was baptized a member of the LDS Church.

In 1845, his son – and our great-greatgrandfather – William Buckminster Lindsay, Jr., married Julia Park – our great-greatgrandmother (she wrote a journal, which I have not read, but a copy may exist at the Daughters of Utah Pioneers Museum in Salt Lake City). I’ll save these two for a future blog posting.

I’m a little fuzzy on whether WBL Sr. and Sarah Myres Lindsay ever moved to Nauvoo, Illinois, where the largest body of the LDS Church membership had settled after being run out of Ohio and Missouri. It seems the family may have remained in Wisconsin during this. Eventually, though, by 1848, they made their way to Kanesville, Pottawattomie, Iowa. The Wardels report:

“The family members joined with the Captain John B. Walker Company for the trip across the plains. This company left Kanesville, 5 July 1852 and arrived in the Salt Lake Valley 3 October 1852. They traveled a distance of approximately 1,000 miles in three months. There were 250 people in the company. … William Buckminster Lindsay's wife, Sarah, died from cancer on 24 October 1852, within three weeks after the group arrived in the Salt Lake Valley from Iowa. She was ill before the family left Iowa but had urged them on so that she could be with the body of the saints before her death. The next year his daughter, Sarah, died in Kaysville or Centerville.”

The history, of course, continues until his death in December 1873. It’s an interesting story, and I hope you’ll take the time to read it: click here.