second mesa

So a while back Justin had a bunch of questions regarding when some of our ancestors made their way to Utah and when they joined the church and why they didn’t have land in Nauvoo and all that.  Well, after some searching I finally have some of the answers.  Here is a pdf file on familysearch.com that largely deals with the Nancy Smoot and her husband John Freeman.  It goes in depth as to where they joined the church, the missionaries that taught them, when they joined the saints, etc.  I found it to be quite informative.  It’s about 13 pages, so feel free to download it and read it when you have time.

Another pdf file that focuses more on John can be found here.  This one goes more in depth to the childhood of John, including his becoming an orphan at an early age, as well as accounts from Wilford Woodruff’s journals concerning the probable teaching of the Freeman family.  It mentions the North Carolina years for the Freeman family (which occurred prior to the birth of John) but I don’t know what those years held for the Freemans.  Perhaps this could be something Justin could look more into?  The majority of the Nancy Smoot file is repeated here, but there are quite a new number of stories/facts told, largely through the journal accounts of others.  The file also contains the patriarchal blessings of John and Nancy as given by Isaac Morley.

Be sure to read the footnotes, you can learn a lot of really interesting things (ie: did you know that some U of U medical researchers were made aware of a condition called “Freeman’s Syndrome” which apparently began with William Hamblin? see footnote 61 for details on what it is).