Fremont Village

Fremont Village

by Justin Durand

They found this ancient Fremont village long after I left Salt Lake, but it’s not too far from one of the places I lived. The Fremont people were related to the Cliff Dwellers (Anasazi, Ancestral Pueblo, whatever we’re calling them now), further south. And like the Cliff Dwellers, the Fremont culture seems to have collapsed about 1300 C.E.

I’ve been fascinated since I was a kid. I’ve known about the Cliff Dwellers as long as I can remember. Probably because I started grade school in Brigham City, Utah and had friends whose families were at the Intermountain Indian School there. Very sad now, but back then we kids loved the mix of Anglo and Indian cultures.

I think the first I heard about the Fremont culture was my 8th grade Colorado history teacher, Mr. Meador. I think anyone who ever had him as a teacher probably ranks him among the best and most memorable. When I had him he was a student teacher for Mr. Legrani.

I wanted to do my “term paper” on the Fremont. If I remember correctly it had to be 3 pages, or maybe it was 5 pages. Handwritten, on notebook paper. This was 8th grade, remember. Anyway, there wasn’t enough source material. I don’t think anyone knew as much about the Fremont people as we do now, and besides, it seems like there has always been much more interest in the Utes, who were there when the Anglos arrived. I settled for doing my paper on the Meeker Massacre. This was 1969. Like every other boy in my class I was drawn to Nathan Meeker because the Utes drove a metal stake through his mouth. He was a preacher. They thought he talked too much. Best story ever.

There is a Fremont site at Glade Park, but I didn’t figure out where it is until many years later. Glade Park is a little community at the Colorado National Monument behind the Redlands, where we lived. And it was only recently that I discovered from Navajo historian Wally Brown that the ancestors of the Navajo lived as far north as the Book Cliffs, an area that would include what is now Glade Park. It seems likely to me there wasn’t as much difference between the Fremont and Ancestral Pueblo cultures, as it seems when looking just at their material culture.

Many years later, when I lived in Salt Lake City, I looked some more for information on the Fremont culture, and also came up empty. Same problems. Not much is known and what little there is gets lost among the volumes of stuff written about the Utes.

Then in 1999 they discovered a Fremont burial in Salt Lake City, at South Temple and 300 West:

“Archaeological sites are not uncommon in Utah, but unearthing this human burial in downtown Salt Lake was a significant discovery. Further excavation by a research team from Brigham Young University uncovered several ancient pit houses, storage pits, fire hearths, and thousands of artifacts dating to 1000 years ago. Pottery, bone needles, arrow points and corn grinding tools provide clues about the Fremont people who lived at this spot. Animal bones found at the site, such as deer, rabbit, bison, and fish, provide information about the foods they ate and the surrounding environment. For example, the fish bones belonged to a minnow that probably came from what is now called City Creek, which flowed adjacent to this prehistoric village.” Archaeology Underfoot (2012).

I lived at 214 West North Temple until about March or April 1978. So close. I wish I had still been there in 1999, or at least still in Salt Lake. I would have enjoyed the feeling of connecting with history by living so close to a known site. (All of us live close to some historic site or another, whether we know it or not.)

Edited Sept. 23, 2019 to clarify the information from Wally Brown.

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Race vs Ethnicity

Race vs Ethnicity

by Justin Durand

Masaman asks, “What’s the difference between the terms race, ethnicity, culture, ancestry, heritage, nationality and other terms that seem like they all should more or less be discussing the same thing?”

What’s the Difference between Race and Ethnicity?

I’ve written about this before, including:

I come back to this subject over and over because it’s often a stumbling block for genealogists. Someone who doesn’t understand the differences will end up making mistakes when they interpret DNA results, and — very often — become confused about whether their own identity.

I’m going to keep posting and posting and posting.

Uncle Brother Joseph

Uncle Brother Joseph

by Justin Durand

The Luces have a connection to Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. Or maybe I should say we have a connection to Uncle Joe and Uncle Brigham. The connection goes through Annie Quarmby (1842-1904), the wife of Wilford Woodruff Luce.

Annie was born in England and came to America as a baby. Her father died at Nauvoo in 1845, probably of swamp fever, and her mother died, they say, at Winter Quarters in 1846/47. Annie was about 5 years old when she became an orphan. She was adopted by her mother’s bishop, Joseph Bates Noble and his wife Mary Adeline Beman.

Annie was orphaned so young she didn’t know her birthday or even her parents’ names. Today we know more about her origin than she did, thanks to the research of her grandson James Luce Marker. (I never tire of pointing out that I learned genealogy from him. I grew up with the story of his search for the Luce family Bible, so when I got interested in genealogy I went straight to him.)

Our connection to Joseph Smith and Brigham Young runs through Annie’s adopted mother. Bates Noble performed the first record plural marriage when he married his wife’s sister Louisa Beaman to Joseph Smith on 5 April 1841 at Nauvoo. After Smith’s assassination in 1844, Louisa Beaman married Brigham Young. There seems to be some uncertainty about the date of her second marriage but FamilySearch.org says 14 January 1846 at Nauvoo.

How fun is that? Two prophets in the family.

Early Black Mormons: Joseph Ball

Early Black Mormons: Joseph Ball

by Justin Durand

When I was first researching the early Luce converts to Mormonism, I wanted to focus on primary sources rather than just repeating the same stories. I already knew the Luces were converted to Mormonism by Wilford Woodruff during his 1838 mission to Maine.

And that’s almost true. Actually, when Wilford Woodruff arrived at Vinalhaven, Maine on 13 January 1838, His mission companion Joseph Ball had already baptized six converts on the North Island: Malatire (sic) and Ruth Luce, their son and daughter-in-law Stephen and Nancy Luce, and their daughter and son-in-law Susan and Nathaniel Thomas.

Several years later, at Nauvoo in 1841, Woodruff wrote about the drowning of Stephen and Nancy’s two young sons—Samuel W. Luce and James F.C. Luce—saying he had baptized the couple himself. Regardless, the Luces seem to have credited their conversion to Wilford Woodruff. They even named a baby after him later that year.

Fun stuff, but that’s not the best part of the story. Several years ago I came across a source that said Ball was black. Really? That seems strange. Until 1978 the Church refused to give the priesthood to blacks. I heard different explanations over the years but the most common was that blacks sat on the fence during the war in heaven in the Pre-existence, so they were allowed to come to earth with human bodies but they were marked by the color of their skin.

With just a little research I discovered the ban on blacks in the priesthood dated from 1849. In other words, it was the teaching of Brigham Young, not of Joseph Smith.

Ball was ordained an elder sometime before January 1838 and the mission with Wilford Woodruff to the Fox Islands. Does that mean the early church allowed blacks to hold the priesthood? The answer isn’t clear.

Ball seems to have joined the Church in 1832. He was probably baptized in Boston by Orson Hyde and Samuel Smith. He might have been privileged to hold his priesthood because of his friendship with William Smith, who was the Prophet’s brother.

But it’s not clear his Mormon contemporaries thought Ball was black. Ball’s father was born in Jamaica. In 1796 he was a member of the African Society of Boston. The 1810 census shows the Ball family as non-white. The 1820 census shows them as “Free Colored Persons”. Then voilà, in 1830 Ball was white. And he was white thereafter. None of his Mormon contemporaries seem to have ever commented on his race, nor is there any evidence they regarded him as black.

I like this story. It pushes our boundaries. In his own lifetime Ball was black, then white. Later generations found out about his background, so retrofitted him to the role of a black man who held the priesthood against what had become the normative rule. For some, he could be pressed into service as an example of the difficulty of policing race in the Church. And now, now we discard all that and just notice the problems of defining race by something like the “one-drop rule“.

So, we have this little bit of history piled on top of the conversion to Mormonism. I like that a lot.

In 2015 I started a project at Geni.com for Early Black Mormons. Just the breath of a beginning. It hasn’t gone very far but I’m hopeful that there is gathering interest in this kind of research.

More Information

  • Geni.com users, Early Black Mormons (updated July 26, 2018), visited Aug. 31, 2019.
  • Jeffrey D. Mahas, Joseph T. Ball, in Century of Black Mormons at University of Utah J. Willard Marriott Library, visited Aug. 31, 2019.
  • Mica McGriggs, Darius Gray, and Christopher C. Smith, Episode 13: Early Black Mormons (Aug. 30, 2019), at SunstoneMagazine.com, visited Aug. 31, 2019.
More on Gallop

More on Gallop

by Justin Durand

A few months ago Stephen Plowman wrote about the Gallop coat of arms as recorded in the 1677 Visitation of Dorset.  It’s an interesting topic for me because I’m a descendant of immigrant Capt. John Gallop (c1593-1650) — like so many other Americans.

Now Plowman is back with more on the Gallops. This time the question is where they got the quartering with the white bear (Azure a bear passant Argent).

Greenland arms
Arms of Greenland

No one knows the origin of these arms. Under English heraldic rules these should be the arms of a heraldic heiress, a woman who transmits her father’s arms to her descendants because she has no brother.

There are two heiresses recorded in the Gallop pedigree at the Visitations. They are Alice, daughter of William Temple, of Templecombe; and Elizabeth daughter of Thomas Thorne, of Caundle Marsh. These arms aren’t known to match to either family. So the mystery remains.

I can’t help but see this figure as a polar bear. It reminds me of the arms of Greenland (Azure a polar bear rampant Argent). Not that Greenland makes any sense in this context, but I love polar bears so I’m always going to see the polar bear connection if there’s one anywhere in the vicinity. (Totally off-topic, but I have a polar bear charm with snow flake obsidian that used to hang from the rear-view mirror of my car.)

Plowman notes the arms quartered with Gallop in this instance match those on record for Aresen (Denmark), in Rietstap’s Armorial Général. An unlikely lead, but it’s the best anyone has so far. Now that I know, I’ll be watching for other instances of a white bear on a blue background.

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