Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship
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Mormon Studies Review

Keywords

genealogy, southern Utah, family history, Mormonism, bate

Abstract

Bate brings the stringent methods of trained historians and scholarly genealogists to bear on the sometimes-fanciful genre of the family genealogy: a publication focusing on only one set of interconnected lineages. His result is a warts-and-all portrayal of everyday life in isolated desert and mountain towns in southern Utah, throughout Mormonism’s f irst century up until the Second World War. His scrutiny of forebears extends to levels of schooling, disease, infant mortality, old age and the end of life, poor financial decision-making, sex before wedlock, and marital tensions. He describes uncongenial personalities when he finds them among his kin. The irritations that can happen in close quarters among otherwise congenial personalities are even more vivid. To appreciate the frankness of Bate and his informants, consider the layered stories told in Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires, on Little House on the Prairie author Laura Ingalls Wilder. Wilder and her kin concealed questionable financial decisions and poverty even when recounting family histories privately, among themselves.1

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