JOHN BREWITT MILNER
27 Jan 1830 – 17 Oct 1912

John is my third great grandfather on my mother’s mother’s side. He was born in Gringley, Nottingham, England. His father died three months before he was born. He was subsequently raised and tutored by his widowed mother, Ann Johnson Milner. John was a good reader and had read the Bible three times by the age of ten. In 1843, when he was just thirteen, he met Mormon missionaries in England and was later baptized.

In 1853, John and his mother left Liverpool, arrived in New Orleans and then took a steamboat up the Mississippi to what is now Iowa; then a staging ground for Mormon emigrants preparing to make the journey to Utah Valley. John and his mother departed with the Cyrus H. Wheelock Company on 1 June 1853 and, along with 400 individuals and 50 wagons, arrived in Utah in early October of that same year.

While on the trail, John met his future wife, Esther Yardley Thurman, also a native of England, and her son. The two were married in March of 1854 in the Salt Lake Endowement House and settled in Provo, Utah.

John first worked as a court reporter for a judge in the first U.S. Court in Utah and later, he became a secretary to Brigham Young. John taught in the first school in Provo and worked as an assessor, tax collector, surveyor, Justice of the Peace, farmer, businessman, state legislator and lawyer.

In 1876, John served as was the personal secretary to George Q. Cannon during congressional hearings on co-habitation. He also practiced law in Arizona, where he was called upon to defend Mormon polygamists. John had four wives.

In later years, John received numerous political appointments, including head of the Utah State Sanitarium in Provo, Utah. When the people of Utah divided on party lines, he joined the Democratic Party and became a leading figure in that organization. He was as firm a believer in democracy as he was in his religion.

He was said to be the oldest member of the Bar Association in Utah. He was teacher of the first public school in Provo, in the Third Ward, and all his life he was interested in educational affairs.

His funeral services were held in the Salt Lake Mormon Tabernacle.

JESSE ANN EDDINGS TRIPP
17 Jun 1839 – 9 May 1923

Jesse is my third great grandmother on my mother’s father’s side. She was born in Cradley, Herefordshire, England, the youngest daughter of George Eddings and Ann Smith Eddings. Her mother, Ann, died just two years after she was born following a complicated delivery of an infant son, her sixth child, George Jr., who followed his mother to the grave just three months later.

Her father, George Eddings, was an early British convert to Mormonism, joining the church in 1840 when Wilford Woodruff came to Herefordshire and converted 600 people in a matter of days; all of whom were baptized in Benbow Pond.

George remarried and his second wife and three surviving children came to America on a schooner in 1842, eventually settling in Nauvoo, Illinois.

In 1846, the family was driven out of Nauvoo by the anti-Mormon mobs. George lost his only son from his second marriage crossing the Missouri river: another boy named George, who was buried close by the banks of the river.

George was a carpenter by trade and helped the displaced Mormons make dug-outs from sod and logs in order to survive the harsh winter of 1846 on the Iowa plains. George eventually took ill from exposure and died in Winter Quarters on 26 April 1847. Jesse, just shy of eight years of age, was placed in the care of a Mrs. Margaret Rushton and she remained in Iowa another two years until, in 1850, she emigrated to the Utah Valley as part of the Edward Hunter Company, the first company funded through church donations to the Perpetual Emigration Fund. She was just eleven years of age, part of 261 individuals and 67 wagon trains who made the journey. The company arrived in Utah on 13 Oct 1850.

In 1857, during the height of the Mormon Reformation, she met Enoch Bartlett Tripp, a visiting teacher assigned to the home where she was living and working as a nanny. Enoch wrote and obtained permission from the Mormon prophet Brigham Young to take Jesse as his third wife. The two were married in the Utah Endowement House on 20 March 1857.

Jesse would give Enoch twelve heirs, including Joseph Willard Tripp, my second great grandfather, who was born in a two-room farmhouse in South Cottonwood in Salt Lake on 12 Nov 1894.

ENOCH BARTLETT TRIPP
29 May 1823 – 25 Jan 1909

Enoch is my third great grandfather on my mother’s father’s side. He was born in Bethel, Maine and traces his ancestry on his mother’s side to Josiah Bartlett, a signer of the Declaration of Independence.

Enoch was a businessman, a boot maker, a shop owner and a school teacher. He came to Nauvoo, Illinois as the Mormons were being driven out, originally intending to profiteer from their evacuation. While in Nauvoo, he stayed with his aunt, Patty Bartlett Sessions and his cousin, David Sessions. After meeting with Heber C. Kimball and Willard Richards, he quickly converted to Mormonism. In Nauvoo, he married Roxanna Billings Tripp in one of the last endowement ceremonies performed in the Nauvoo Temple.

Enoch was asked to stay in Nauvoo since he was unknown and could help settle Mormon church affairs. He was close to Lucy Mack Smith and Emma Smith and taught some of Emma and Joseph Smith Jr’s children: Joseph III, Frederick, Alexander, and an adopted daughter named Julia.

With his first wife and children, he finally departed for the Utah Valley after being prompted by a voice one day, which told him “Get ye up into the valley of the mountains”. His family traveled to Utah without incident, arriving on July 27, 1853.

Enoch was a consummate diarist and wrote over 1,700 pages of journal entries detailing his activities from 1845 through 1908, the year before he died. His original journals are now part of the special collections at the Harold B. Lee library at the Brigham Young University.

Enoch was one of the last people to speak with Lucy Mack Smith, the mother of the first Mormon prophet, before she died; a meeting which he detailed in his journal in November 1855. He had stopped by Nauvoo to see her on his way back from serving a mission in Maine:

“I called upon the Prophet’s Mother and found her in a lonely room in the eastern part of the house in her bed and very feeble. Upon approaching her bedside and informing her who I was, she arose in her bed and placing her arms around my neck kissed me exclaiming, ‘I can now die in peace since I have beheld your face from the valleys of the mountains.'”