MOTHER'S DAY TALK GIVEN IN MURRAY

MAY 13, 2001

The great Roman Orator, Cicero, wrote: "TO BE IGNORANT OF WHAT OCCURRED

BEFORE YOU WERE BORN IS TO REMAIN ALWAYS A CHILD. FOR WHAT IS THE WORTH OF

HUMAN LIFE, UNLESS IT IS WOVEN INTO THE LIFE OF OUR ANCESTORS BY THE

RECORDS OF HISTORY."

Mothers day is a day for remembering their history or reviewing

their lives and what they have done for us.

This day is set apart every year in honor of motherhood.

On the second Sunday in May many families and churches make a special point

of honoring mothers. Many people follow the custom of wearing a carnation on

Mother's Day. If a person wears a colored carnation, it mens that his mother

is living. If he wears a white Carnation, it indicates that his mother is

dead.

A day for honoring mothers was observed may years ago in England. It was

called Mothering Sunday.. Julia Ward Howe made the first known suggestion

for a Mother's Day in the United States in 1872.

In 1904 Frank E. Hering of South Bend, Ind. Launched a campaign for Mother's

Day. Three years later Anna Jarvis of Grafton W. Va, began a campaign for a

nationwide observance. It was she who chose the second Sunday in May and

began the custom of wearing a carnation.

On May 8, 1915 President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed Mother's Day as an

annual national observance. So in America it took 43 years for Mother's day

to become a national holiday. But the Lord has commanded us to remember

our parents since time began. Both in the Ten Commandments given to Moses on

the Mount and, as recorded again, in the Book of Mormon, by the Prophet

Abinadi, we are admonished to: "Honor thy father and thy mother that thy

days may be long upon the land the which the Lord thy God giveth thee."

In Proverbs 1:8 ...forsake not the law of thy mother. And another Proverb

15:20 ...a foolish man despiseth his mother.

In Alma Chapter 56 is the account of Helaman and his strippling soldiers who

were protected in battle as they lived and honored the words of their mothers

in faith . as they rehearsed these immortal words to Helaman, "We do

not doubt our mothers knew it."

We all have wonderful memories and reverence for our mothers. For those who

have had the good fortune of parents and grand parents who have left journals

we know what a great thing it is to be able to read stories of their

lives and their struggles and appreciate the fact that they were great

people.

My Paternal Great Great Grandmother was born in England 1824. Her name was

Hannah. She was married to a Benjamin Spence. They had a little boy name

Robert. When the Missionaries came to their door and talked to her she

recognized the truth of the Gospel and was very anxious to join the Church.

But her husband was instantly an enemy to the truth and refused to let

her have anything to do with the Church. But as time went on she made the

decision to be baptized against her husbands will. She was then expecting

their second child and her husband accused her of infidelity and charged her

with adultery naming the missionary.

In England during the 1800's a husband had absolute control over his wife and

children. His word was law. He forced her to leave their home and she

was not allowed to take little Robert with her. Her parents disowned her

. She was alone in a the world without help, there were no social

services, no welfare, no sympathy...and she was alone and pregnant.

She went to London where she worked as a domestic until the baby was born.

She named him William...and he was known as Billy even as an adult.

She left Billy in care of a young girl while she was at work and

one day the girl dropped him on the hearth stone and it broke his ankle.

Without medical treatment it did not heal properly and he was crippled all

his life.

In London, after a time, Hannah met Charles Carpenter, he had joined the

Church in 1850 when he was 23 years old. They were married and began to plan

on immigrating to America.

They had been married about nine years before they were able to get the

needed money for the ocean voyage and living expenses and travel before

they even reached the point of departure near Winter Quarters where

they would have to travel by wagon to Salt Lake. They had had two

children during their years in London, Samuel and Elizabeth. Billy was

growing up

and was about fourteen years old when they came to America. They eventually

made their way as far as Winter Quarters but had to stay a year there while

Charles worked to earn enough money to make the trip to the Valley.

A member who was leaving for Salt Lake Valley that first summer asked the

Carpenters if he could take Billy with them to drive one of his teams.

It was hard for Hannah to let him go for he had been a frail child but

trusting in the Lord for his safety she agreed.

Many parents lost some of their children to disease and exposure on that

hard long hard, arduous journey over those miles and miles of

wilderness. The Carpenters were not spared this tragedy.. They too,

buried their little darling 2 year old Elizabeth in a lonely grave

along the trail to the Valley.

As they came into Salt Lake after their long hard journey, Hannah looked

anxiously at the welcoming crowd trying to find her son. Finally little

Samuel tugged at her skirts and pointing to a tall sturdy lad said,

"Maw...isn't that our Billy.?" "No Sammy, that isn't Billy" she answered,

But soon Sammy gave a whoop and ran and threw his arms around the tall youth

who was indeed a healthy grown up Billy. He always laughed and thought it a

great joke that his own mother didn't know him after only a years separation.

They were faithful Saints in the building up of the Church in Utah. They

were sent by Brigham Young to help settle several of the communities.

Hannah was not well and the loss of her first born son weighed heavily on her

heart. She had not heard of him in all these years.

Her first husband had told Robert that his mother was dead. But people who

had known Hannah told him the true story of his mothers having to leave him.

He decided to try to find her...and not even knowing if she had married again

, only knowing that she had joined the Mormons and that they had come to

America..

He had joined the British Army and eventually was sent to Canada. From

there he set out on his search for his mother. He wrote letters and sent them

to Utah asking if anyone knew anything about her.

. He waited for a long year before a letter found him and

she answered., "Oh Robert come to your Mother." He heeded her call and left

the Army and worked his way to Utah where they were reunited.

Robert joined the Church and fulfilled a mission and raised a wonderful

family. He had been well educated by his father and was a school teacher

who blessed the lives of many of the pioneer children.

Hannah died of cancer when she was only 53 years old. She recorded in her

journal her testimony of the Gospel of Jesus Christ in such memorable

words that mean so much to me...her Great Great Grand Daughter.

She said, " This Gospel is true, I have always known it. And even if every

one else in the world denied the faith, yes even the Prophet, yet I would

know it is true and stay faithful to the Lord."

We who live in this modern world, filled with every type of luxury can

hardly have an inkling of what it must have been like to raise a family,

make a living in their kind of a world. The every day struggle to provide

food and

shelter took all of their time and energy and yet we see how they yearned

for the blessings of eternal life. How they sacrificed so much to raise

families and how they longed to be sealed together in the temple and what a

hard thing it was for many of them to secure this blessing.

My own Mother was not a pioneer in the sense of crossing the plains to come

to Utah as did her own parents. She was one of 16 children and

lived through many hard times.

When my parents married there was little chance of them being able to make

the trip to the Salt Lake Temple. After all they lived a whole 180 miles

away. They lived in Vernal Utah...which must have seemed like the end

of the earth to them in their desire to reach the temple. There were no

cars...not in Vernal... people traveled by horse and wagon. They had

neither horse nor wagon.

She had always dreamed of getting married in the Temple...and after

having lost their first baby, who died just three days after birth..it made

them all the more eager to be sealed as a family. They had another baby

son who was just two months old in September 1910 and she knew if they did

not go soon it would be too cold and dangerous to make the trip. She hd been

very ill for a long time and was ill prepared to make such a journey.

They had to borrow a wagon and team...take food and bedding and clothing

to last for a long seven day journey to Salt Lake and a seven day journey

home again. (A journey of seven days that we can make today in the comfort

of climate controlled cars in just three hours). My Dad put a mattress in

the wagon and hung a canvas over some poles to make a shield from the weather

so that Mom could lie down with the baby. She was much too weak to sit up

all those days.

They stopped on one of the nights and Dad built a fire to fix food for them.

Mom was in the wagon with the baby. Dad smelled burning fabric and turned

to see that a spark from the campfire had landed on the canvas and set it

afire. He knew Mom and the baby were in that wagon and he ran over and

pulled the burning canvas off the wagon with his bare hands. Mom had seen

the spark start the fire and had rolled off the mattress onto the ground

behind the wagon with the baby in her arms and had passed out under the

wagon.

He carried her away and then ran to the stream for water and put out the

fire that had started in the mattress. Now they had no bed for her...and

still days before they reached Salt Lake. The mattress was so wet that they

put it up on a rock to dry, intending to get it on the return trip.

They arrived on a Thursday night...and went to the Temple on Friday

morning. My Mom was so weak that she was almost unable to walk. The sisters

asked her if she didn't think they should postpone it and come back on

Monday. She told them they did not have money to stay in the City and had to

leave in the morning for the return trip. So the sweet sisters literally

supported her and helped her through the session.

As she told me the story I could scarcely envision such an experience.

How she must have suffered, bumping along on those unpaved roads in the

bottom of the wagon for another seven days! When they got to the place

where the mattress had burned they discovered that some one else had found it

and taken it...and it was a loss to them. I have often thought of how

really poor they must have been to feel a loss of that burned mattress.

Our mother's influence can last a life time. Long after they are gone and

other memories dim we can recall the tenderness and caring of our mothers.

My mother had been dead many years when she spoke to me in such a

way that it could not have been more real had she stood at my side.

My father had been called to be the Ward Clerk in the early 1900's. He did

not feel he could accept the call since his hand writing was not very legible

and he felt inadequate about keeping the records. (In those early days the

Clerk's records were sent in just as they were written down during the

Sacrament meeting.) My mother told him that if he would take the minutes of

the meetings she would enter them into the record book each week for him. So

he accepted the call and together they kept the records of the proceedings of

the Sacrament meetings.

Now we jump ahead to about 1979

When the Church assigned all members to complete their four generation

ancestry sheets and turn them into the Genealogical Department it seemed like

a mammoth undertaking to me.

They gave us two years to complete the task...then when so many did not

comply the time was extended another two years. They wanted not only the

names of our people but they wanted the dates of their birth, christening,

baptism, marriage, ordination dates for he men and death and burial...and

they asked that each and every date be verified and a record made where the

information came from. Such as family records, Bureau of Vital Statistics,

Church Records, etc. It made a lot of dates to verify...especially since

just my mothers parents had 16 children. That was over l00 dates for this

one family.

I had been working on the project for a long time and failed to find the

verification of the date of my eldest sister's christening. I had searched

in records at the genealogy library with no success.

A woman who had done genealogy research for our family in the past suggested

that I look in the actual minutes that had been submitted by the Ward Clerks

in those early days of the church....those records were still in their

original form and available only to professional researchers.

She made an appointment for me to meet her there and let me search through

the microfilm. I read through many months of meetings and was quite

engrossed with how unique those writings were.

Many of the brethren that accepted calls to be Ward Clerks in those days

had had very little, if any, formal education. The way those men expressed

themselves as they took down that information was so fascinating to read and

I was quite engrossed in it when it just dawned on me that I was reading my

mother's own handwriting.

The very words that my father had written and my mother had copied into

the record ,before I was born, were there in her distinctive, beautiful

handwriting before my eyes, and it seemed, somehow, an affirmation , an

approval of what I was doing for our family.

I did find my sisters christening date...for I found the minutes of the Fast

Meeting for the month after she was born. They were not written in that

record by my father but the Ward Clerk had made mention that " Today four

infants were named and blessed, one female and three males." So I assumed it

was her date since there was no o her record of babies blessed in the

following months.

It is indeed fitting that we have this special day set aside to honor our

mothers, whether they are still alive or have gone on before us we can be

sure that they love us and want us to be happy.

True Mother love is not unlike the love of our Savior. It is unconditional

in it's scope. Always reaching out to us...always wanting us to be our

best. Always wanting us to live so that we can be together as families

forever.

That this also may be our goal I pray

In the Name of Jesus Christ

Amen