Walking over to the Lindsay side of the family

Haven't done a whole lot with the Lindsay branch of our family, so I thought I'd hop onto that limb today with a look at William Buckminster Lindsay, Jr. I should explain right up front that over the years I've tried two or three times to contact modern-day Lindsays via e-mail, asking permission to re-post items from their websites on our Henderson Family Reunion page, but have never received a response. (The e-mails weren't bounced back, so I'm sure someone got them; I guess they're just not interested in the correspondence. If anyone knows a member of the Lindsay family, please let them know we'd love to have them in here helping, commenting, showing us the way.)

So, I've forged ahead, given them due credit and haven't been asked to take them down despite all the copyright notifications on the Lindsay websites. I sincerely hope they don't mind.

As any of you know who've looked at the Lindsay pages linked to from our Henderson site, I've had photos up of Lindsays I had no way of identifying. But my visit last summer to Marsha's house provided me with plenty of information and I'm now in the process of matching names to the faces.

William Buckminster Lindsay, Jr., was born Dec. 25, 1821, in Jamestown, Canada, the son of William Buckminster Lindsay, Sr., of Vermont, and Sarah Myers, of Yorkshire, England. He grew up on "his father's 77-acre farm near Rideau Lake, Leeds County, Canada."

He joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints at age 20 in 1842, and married Julia Parks on Feb. 19, 1845, in Nauvoo, Ill. (Julia and William Jr. were the parents of Julia Ann Lindsay, who married Hyrum Henderson; Julia Ann and Hyrum were the parents of my grandfather, David Monroe Henderson.) According to the account by Rex B. Lindsay/David J. Wardell, there exists an autobiography by Julia Parks Lindsay. It would be really nice to get a copy, or find out where we could get one to distribute to family members.

In 1846, as the Latter-day Saints were being hounded out of Nauvoo, William B. Lindsay, Jr. and Julia P. Lindsay were preparing to leave when he was called to serve as a guard for Brigham Young. This delayed Julia P.'s departure, and she stayed with her sister, Fannie, until

"there was another company about ready to start. I had the opportunity of going with my brother-in-law. I felt very anxious to go for I had heard that my husband was quite sick with the measles and I knew that he would be exposed to the cold and would not have much to comfort him and although I felt very loath to leave my dear sister, yet I felt it a duty to go.

"I started, but it being a very rainy spring, the roads were very bad, and I had traveled a whole week and never got into the wagon to ride, and some days we would only go two miles. I did not overtake my husband until I got to Garden Grove, and he was just getting so that he could work a little."

Then came polygamy. William Jr. married a second wife, Parmelia Charlotte Ann Blackman, "with the permission of his first wife, Julia."

Later, the family arrived in Utah, settling in Kaysville in 1853 (which, ironically, is where Samuel Henderson and his family first landed in Utah. But tragedy struck when "two of Julia's three children, all girls, were stricken with scarlet fever and were laid low by the hand of death in the fall of 1853."

William Jr. took a third wife, Sarah Elizabeth Henderson, in 1854. They all lived there about 13 years, and were farmers. In 1860, they divided into separate homes. And four years later, moved to the Bear Lake Valley.

In the fall of 1869, twelve of the family came down with typhoid fever. There were no doctors in the Bear Lake Valley at that time. Two boys died at this time. One was a ten year old son of Julia and the other was a six year old son of Parmelia. Both died within twenty four hours of each other. For three months the house was like a hospital and they did not know how ow whether they would be able to survive the ordeal. Minnie Lindsay Sorenson describes the conditions in the Bear Lake Valley in those first years in her history of William Buckminster Lindsay, Jr.

So, there's yet another history of William Jr. we should track down.

It's also worth noting that Julia P. Lindsay was the first Relief Society president in the area. Indeed, several years ago when Jan and I were vacationing near Bear Lake with our two youngest daughters, we visited the Paris, Idaho, storefront "museum" and our daughter Sarah noticed a large portrait of Julia hanging on the wall. And although the Paris Tabernacle was closed for renovations at the time, cousin Kathleen Wheeler had visited there a few years earlier and took photos of "hair flowers" in the tabernacle that included some of our Great-Grandmother Julia's actual hair. (It's an odd custom, I think, but one that apparently was not uncommon at the time.)

I think you'll find it all pretty interesting reading. I think it would be great to get access to those two books, too. Anybody have any information? Kathleen, is Julia's autobiography the one you said was available at the Daughter of Utah Pioneers museum?

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.