Comments on: Without Purse or Scrip in Texas: 9 June – 21 June 1901

By: Julia

Julia — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 18:19:35 +0000

Ardis-
How interesting. Are there posts from their journals or writings? Did they go to the temple to be sealed? I assume that some of the family eventually made it to Utah (since you are there) and married members there? Do you know how they related to their neighbors? Did all of the children marry members? Did they all stay in the church?

Feel free to send me off to the right posts.

By: Ardis E. Parshall

Ardis E. Parshall — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 16:22:31 +0000

Julia, they were on their own, unless there were other members nearby to meet with. They were encouraged to subscribe to the Liahona and other Church publications, and the missionaries would call on them the next time they came through (we’ve seen Elder Jones call on members a very few times earlier in his journal), but mostly they were on their own.

We’ve had a few stories about missionaries calling on people who had been baptized years earlier but hadn’t ever seen or heard from a Mormon since then, yet they considered themselves LDS and so did the missionaries. At exactly the same time Elder Jones is writing, my own family were isolated members like this in Alabama. They held a home Sunday School part of the time, and they always welcomed and took care of the missionaries who passed through, but they had no day-to-day Mormon communal life like members in the Mormon West had.

By: Julia

Julia — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 15:44:55 +0000

It is interesting that they don’t seem to stay in any place long enough to teach people, even when they are asked to stay, to bring anyone to the point of baptism. Were the missionaries expected to find converts? If they did baptize someone, what was expected of those converts after baptism?

By: J. Stapley

J. Stapley — Sun, 16 Sep 2012 21:58:19 +0000

” It was the first time I had stayed where the man was away but circumstances were such that we had it to do.”

Long before the white handbook.