The Human Drama of Family History Work

Charles Watson was born in 1844 in the village of Old Brampton in the county of Derbyshire, England. He was the fourth of seven sons. Brampton was a small farming community two miles outside of Chesterfield, the second largest town in the county. His father was a farmer and Charles grew up on his father's farm.

A central teaching of the Church of Jesus Christ is performing vicarious religious ordinances or rituals for those who have died. We consider these ordinances, properly performed by those who have authority, to be essential for salvation and even those who may have been baptized in another church while they were alive needs to have a properly authorized baptism performed for them. While the choice to accept the ordinance still rests on each individual, we believe that a physical action must be done for each and every individual ever born.

Hannah Parsons was born in the village of Old Brampton in 1846, three weeks before her parents were married. Because her parents were not married at the time she was born, she did not officially have her father's last name, and had only the maiden name of her mother. But later in life everyone just assumed, including perhaps Hannah herself, that her name was Hannah Fretwell. But the "Parsons" part of her name was remembered and appeared in later records. She was the first of ten children.

In support of the endeavor to find each individual and perform religious rituals for them, members of the church do extensive family history work, or genealogy, to find the names of those who have died and have not had the opportunity to have the proper authorized ordinances performed while alive. In doing this work we tend to focus on the work of sifting through records, finding the names and dates, and making sure our sources are correct before we submit the names to the Temple so that the proper, authorized religious rituals are performed for them.

Hannah and Charles both lived in the small village of Brampton, and in 1870 they were married. At the time Charles was working as a coal miner. His father had passed away before Charles was married, and the family had sold the farm. All of Charles's brothers were working as coal miners to fuel the raging industrial revolution in England.

While most of genealogy work may be dry and boring, sifting through records and names, looking at images of records and trying to decipher the cryptic handwriting of some parish priest, every once in a while a story comes out of records. It is a story told not in verse or sweeping epics, but in names and dates. In the middle of the most boring historical records imaginable, emerges a tale of human drama, death, heartache, and uncertainty that would be fit for any dramatic tale.

Hannah and Charles had their first child in 1869, and they named her Sarah Parsons Watson. At that time and place it was unusual for people to have three names, but Hannah, who was born Hannah Parsons, kept that part of her name in the name of her first daughter. Over the next seven years they had three more daughters, Mary, Emma Parsons, and Charlotte.

As members of the Church we are encouraged to remember our ancestors. But there are some ancestors who tend to get more coverage than others, while there are those who quietly fade into the background. In these less commonly traversed branches of the family tree are found the quiet human dramas that make up the human experience.

In July 1878 tragedy struck the Watson family. Charles died. There is no record of how he died, only that he was buried in the church yard of St. Thomas in Brampton. Given his work as a coal miner it is possible his death was related to that. This left his wife a widow with four small daughters aged 8, 6, 4, and 2. As a widow living in a poor working class community it would have been very difficult.

There is a perception that history is made by well known, great individuals who through force of will or strength of character form the axis of history. But most of human history is made up of normal people, going about their lives, quietly living out the everyday dramas that make us human.

Within two years Hannah had remarried. Her new husband, William Gregory, was a widower with six children of his own. William was also a coal miner. The marriage produced no more children and it may have been a marriage of convenience. Hannah needed a way to support her daughters, and William needed someone to watch his small children while he worked in the coal mines. 

However the family did it, all 10 children lived in a modest house in poor working class conditions. That is, until 1887 when Hannah passed away. Again there is no record of how she died, or even where she was buried. We do not even know the exact date of her death since it is only recorded in a England death registry which only gives the year and quarter (range of three months). At the ages of 17, 15, 13, and 11 Hannah's four daughters were left orphans. At the time they were living with their stepfather and his six children. 

There is very little known about what happened to Hannah's four daughters in the intervening years, but I managed to find all four of them in the 1891 census.
Sarah Parsons married Isaac Burt in 1890. She would go on to have eight children, with the last two born in Illinois in the United States. Her husband Isaac was a coal miner, and near the end of the 1800's the coal in Derbyshire was running out. In 1905 they emigrated to the US so that Isaac and his sons could work as coal miners in Braceville, Illinois. 

In 1891 Mary Watson, Charles and Hannah's second daughter, was working in a cotton mill while living with her grandparents Francis and Fanny Fretwell. In 1893 she married Daniel Hughes and they had four children. They stayed in Chesterfield, Derbyshire their entire lives. 

By 1891 Emma Parsons Watson, the third daughter, was 16 years old and was living as a domestic servant to a well-to-do family in Chesterfield. After this she disappears from the record and I can not trace her life after that. I do not know if she got married, had a family or died alone. Her life, right now, is an unknown drama. 

Shortly after her mother died, Charlotte Watson went to live with another family. At the age of 11 she began working as a domestic servant. Shortly after moving in with her employers the family moved to somewhere near Sheffield, which is in Yorkshire, the county next to Derbyshire. She was still living with them four years later in 1891 when she appears in the census. Like her sister Emma, she disappears from the records after this and I can't trace her. 

Encapsulated in the family of Charles and Hannah is great portions of modern human history. There is the disruption of traditional farming communities by the industrial revolution, and the fuel of the revolution was coal. The families lived in poor conditions in a town that grew around industry and coal. Chesterfield expanded because of the industrial revolution, and while it ultimately helped lift people out of poverty, the process was difficult and painful. There were families who lost their fathers, and children who were left orphans. We only have to read a Charles Dickens novel to learn of harsher side of the industrial revolution.

After becoming an orphan, their eldest daughter, survived and started her own family. That family now lives in the US and they may not remember where they came from.

The second daughter stayed in England and navigated the changes that came after the industrial revolution. They were a working class family where the children dropped out of school by the age of 12 and started working.

Anyone who does enough family history work knows that sometimes people disappear from the written record. The other two daughters, Emma and Charlotte, and emblematic of those who quietly disappear in the milieu of history. Hopefully they can be found someday, because everyone should be remembered.

Laman and Lemuel Did Not Think of Themselves as Apostate

In Sunday School lessons in the Church when we discuss Laman and Lemuel we tend to portray them as faithless, scheming, disobedient reprobates who still mummer and complain even after they are shown miracles and angels. Many seem to have a cartoon image of Laman as the stereotypical cartoon villain, complete with evil goatee, and Lemuel as his whiny, dimwitted sidekick.

This simple portrayal seems so obvious, because how else could someone see an angel, experience miracles, hear the word of the Lord, and still not believe? Obviously they had to be faithless schemers or why else would they reject the plain truths as taught by Nephi? They don't even bother to pray, and if they can't even do something as simple and fundamental as that, then obviously they don't have faith and care nothing for religion and eternal truths. Right? Are they really just the faithless, wayward sons of a good man and a prophet? 

Previously I have written about the complex social and religious environment that produced what we now know as the Old Testament. The time of Lehi was an interesting period in history. There was major political upheaval, a previous king of Judah had pushed through some major religious reforms, new histories were being compiled, and differing strands of religious thought were vying for supremacy.

If we read Jeremiah in the Bible we can get a sense that there was disagreement between groups of priests about political matters. There seems to be one group who were very much in support of the king and another that supported Jeremiah. While we may look back and say, "Obviously they should have supported Jeremiah." For those living at the time it may not have been so clear since those opposed to Jeremiah included the High Priest. But even this "picking sides" was not so straight forward since even those who opposed Jeremiah held him in high regard. When the king learned that Jeremiah was in prison he arranged for him to be rescued.

We learn from Nephi that his father Lehi supported Jeremiah, while Laman and Lemuel probably supported the monarchists and the High Priest. One of the harshest criticisms that Lehi leveled against his sons was that they were planning to do to him what the Elders had done to Jeremiah. This was not a criticism that Laman and Lemuel took lightly, but in fact took very seriously. By reading Nephi's account we can easily get the impression that Laman and Lemuel never listened to their father. But if we read carefully we can see that they listened to his prophecies and followed his commands. They did after all go get the brass plates, and they did attempt to buy them with all that they had. They did hold reverence for the word of God.

While some have tried to explain Laman and Lemuel's obedience to their father as some manifestation of the high regard that their culture gave to obedience to parents, that seems like a gross over simplification of the culture at the time, and still does not explain why they chose to follow Nephi at many points.

When we consider the interaction between Laman, Lemuel, and Nephi we unknowingly impose our modern biases on the story. To illustrate this let us consider perhaps the most over used but entirely misinterpreted interaction between Nephi and his brothers.

In 1 Nephi 8 we have recorded Lehi's famous vision of the tree of life. Immediately after this experience Nephi "desired to know the things that [his] father had seen" and thus sought and received the revelatory experience recorded in 1 Nephi 11-14. Upon returning to the camp where his family was staying Nephi found Laman and Lemuel debating the vision of their father. Prompted by Nephi's questions Laman and Lemuel responded, "Behold, we cannot understand the words which our father hath spoken concerning the natural branches of the olive tree, and also concerning the Gentiles."

This response prompted Nephi to ask the question that forms the basis of so many seminary, institute, Sunday School lessons, Sacrament meeting talks and question prompts in church manuals.

"And I said unto them: Have ye inquired of the Lord?"
"And they said unto me: We have not; for the Lord maketh no such thing known unto us."

To us, Nephi's question is so blindingly obvious, and Laman and Lemuel's response so typical of non-believers that it may not occur to us that Laman and Lemuel could very well have a rational reason for not praying to know the interpretation. In our culture we are accustomed to the concept of praying. For us the most fundamental way we interact with the divine is to pray. It is so ingrained in our culture that we do not realize that in a different culture it may not be so obvious.

In our culture it is natural for us to ask, "Have ye inquired of the Lord?" We would think it very odd to go looking for someone who could use divination to answer our questions. In our culture the practice of using peep stones, divination in cups, and seemingly magical items is not considered socially acceptable or valid for divine communication. But in the culture at the time of Lehi not only was divination acceptable, but firmly entrenched as the preeminent method of divine communication.

In 1 Samuel 23 there is the story of David on the run from King Saul. Wanting to know the King's plans, David consulted with the priest Abiathar. In order to get an answer, David asked Abiathar to bring the ephod (part of the high priest's clothing associated with the Urim and Thummim) so that they could receive revelation from the Lord. There are other instances where questions directed to the Lord could not be answered without the use of the Urim and Thummim.

At the time of Lehi praying to ask the Lord questions was not ingrained in the culture. If someone wanted to ask the Lord a question they would have to find someone with a sacred object to be used for divination. Thus for Laman and Lemuel, if they wanted to know the interpretation of Lehi's vision, an obvious course of action would not be to pray and ask, but to find someone with a Urim and Thummim, or similar item, that could divine the answer.

When Nephi begins to explain the vision Laman and Lemuel are not passively listening, but actively asking questions. In fact they ask better questions than you would find in most Sunday School lessons about Lehi's vision. These are not the actions of non-believers who failed to ask questions. They did apply themselves and attempt to understand the vision, but because of their culture it did not occur to them that they could pray and ask the Lord for answers. They were keeping firmly within their religious tradition and thought that these were answers that could only be answered by a seer with some sacred object for divination.

It is particularly telling that after this experience, but before they traveled into the desert Lehi was given the Liahona, which was a sacred object that could communicate the word of the Lord. It was like the ephod for David, or the Urim and Thummim for the priests. It validated Lehi's position as a seer in the eyes of Laman and Lemuel. As a seer that had an object that could he could look into and see sacred communications, Lehi and his visions were established as divine. Hence Laman and Lemuel could follow him into the desert.

Also years later when they were in danger of starving in the desert Laman and Lemuel murmured against Lehi, partly because he had failed to use the Liahona. They eventually followed Nephi because he could use the Liahona, the sacred object that provided divine communication.

Sometimes there are things that are "obvious" to us and we wonder how anyone could be so dimwitted not to see the obvious. But it is important to remember that people like to think they have a good reason for doing what they do. For Laman and Lemuel praying to know the interpretation of a vision was according to their culture "weird". Using a sacred object to divine the answer was just as normal and obvious to them as praying is to us.