Searching for the pioneers in my family's past

Part 1: Another side of the family appears

I have always been fascinated by family histories, especially my own. I grew up in the same small North Carolina town where my mother was raised, and was fortunate enough to be born in 1949, while three of my mother’s grandparents were still alive, at least briefly, giving me that unmistakable feel of immediate connection to the past. And though I did not get to know them well, for reasons of their various illnesses—they were all in failing health, in their late 70s, and all died before I was six years old—I felt their presence long after they departed, through proximity to my mother, who was close to them her whole life; my widowed grandmother, Wilma (Mimi); and my great-aunt Bessie, my grandfather’s only sister. And my mother’s sisters and brother were regular visitors from their new homes, reinforcing the family ties.

My great-grandparents are all buried in Dunn’s small cemetery, in family plots, along with many of their children who died young, and back then our Sundays were often spent driving through the cemetery after church to pay our respects and inevitably, discuss the ways in which we were related to half the small town in which we lived. In some ways, they were still alive, as if they had never left. The Wilsons, the Massengills, the Blanchards, and the Cookes—I knew about them all, that their ancestors had immigrated from Wales or England, mostly, in the mind-to-late 18th century, when the country was still young. At least one of my great-great-great-grandfathers had actually fought in the Revolutionary War—which delighted my aunt Tootsie, the family genealogist, no end. And another one, my great-great-grandmother Weltha (aka “Wealthy”) Cooke, had committed the ultimate apostacy—marrying a Yankee soldier she met during during Sherman’s March to the Sea … that he was actually from Kentucky, drafted against his will, and as Southern as she was made no difference …

Occasionally we drove out to a nearby town, Newton Grove, where my mother and her siblings had spent much time as a young child in the 1920s on a family-owned farm. On that farm there was a small family cemetery, where my great-grandmother, Elvira Wilson, had been born just after the Civil War, before marrying and moving to Dunn. Her parents were buried there, with one older sister and brother. There were also two empty graves there—to Elvira’s much older half-brothers, John J. and Francis Columbus Wilson, who had died in that War and were buried where they fell. She was the youngest of her father‘s dozen children, by two wives, and had never known these two brothers.

In 1863, just after Gettysburg, Joseph Wilson had walked 40 miles to the state capital to find out what news he could from state government—only to learn both had died, one at Gettysburg—and walked home again, only to find a last letter waiting for him from Francis, explaining how his brother had been shot and died at Chancellorsville that spring. In his grief, he paid for headstones for both of them, to lie beside their late mother, and in turn, beside him and his second wife, Elizabeth Ann, who was Elvira’s mother.

Nearly a century later, I often found myself standing at their empty graves, in a small graveyard where time, it seemed, was frozen. I would imagine Joseph Wilson raising the stones to his dead sons, keeping them close to him, as he waited for the seemingly endless war to end—and even as stragglers from Sherman’s Army marched through and took his livestock and threatened to burn his house down if he didn’t turn over what little money and silver he had hidden away. He shrugged and said “Burn it…” For some reason, they did not.

I suppose it was only natural that I knew so much more about Mother’s family than the more distant family on Daddy’s side. He had grown up in Utah, more than 2,000 miles away, and spending time with his parents and siblings was limited to fairly brief summer vacations spent driving across the country while school was out. I adored my Grandpa Ben—a rancher and accountant, for whom I was named—and Grandma Blanche, a schoolteacher who we all called “Grandma Ba,” and treasured my time with them. They were loving but somehow compartmentalized in my mind—not so closely connected to the life I knew, locked away in that mountainous desert south of Salt Lake City, so different from the flat sandy coastal plain of my hometown, nearly a continent away.

My Utah grandparents, Ben and Blanche Justesen, ca.1964. Author’s photo

They did not talk much about their extended families. Grandma had two sisters, Georgia and Lydia, who lived in Nevada and California, respectively; I never met my great-aunt Georgia, but did meet Lydia years later when I was traveling on the West Coast…) They were Mormons, which I assumed helped explain some or most of their reticence; they were hospitable, yes, and always kind, and happy to have us out there, but a bit clannish, and clearly preferred their Mormon neighbors to outsiders. Daddy’s grandparents had all died decades earlier, and I never got the chance to meet any of them; there was really no else old enough to ask, to probe, for details.

My Dad had been drafted into the Army just before World War II, and gone from Utah for many years. He had left the LDS Church behind to marry Mother during the war, then joined her Protestant church, and had never looked back. Despite the somewhat complicated religious rift, he did stay in close touch with his parents and siblings; his older brother Craig—another prodigal who married a Catholic and became an Episcopalian—and younger sister, Elaine, had both remained in Utah, along with my four first cousins. But even Daddy’s close friends from before the war were reserved when he visited, not unfriendly, but “polite” rather than cordial. The Church dominated almost every walk of life out there.

Grandma Ba, bless her heart, had tried diligently to lure him back to the fold, even making sure that every young missionary the Church sent to eastern North Carolina tracked him down. And with our so-very Danish surname, Justesen, which no one else could ever spell or pronounce properly, we were not very difficult to find—just about the only family with that name among 6 million Tar Heels when I was a kid.

I was 15 the summer my family took our last road trip to Utah. It was my third time on the road. My older brother Wayne, my baby sister Beth, and I drove out there with my parents—nearly 2,500 miles each way—and saw the Grand Canyon, the Royal Gorge, and even Dogpatch, Kentucky, to name just a few of the more memorable attractions. It was that summer that I began learning more about Daddy’s family—all about his ancestors, and all the twists and turns and hidden secrets in the Justesen family tree—and first became hooked on genealogical research.

It all started with an unexpected funeral …

* * * * * * * *

We had been in the small town of Manti, the county seat of Sanpete County, where Grandma and Grandpa maintained the main family home, for about a week when Daddy’s Uncle Ern (Ernest) died. That was a bit of a shock—any death, of course, is a bit upsetting—but the shock for me was that I did not know I even had an Uncle Ern, much less that he had been sick. All I had ever been told about his brothers and sisters was that Grandpa Ben was the baby of his family, and now at 81, was the last sibling still alive—his eight older siblings having already passed. At least that was what I had always heard. His last brother, Uncle Joe, had died four years earlier, at 92!

Turned out Uncle Ern, however, was from an entirely different marriage—a simultaneous marriage, as it turned out—and there were a total of 10 children in that second family. So polygamy was involved! So my grandfather has actually had a half-brother and nine more half-siblings, as well—four of whom who were still alive. I went to the family wake, as I called it, which was a big outdoor picnic—non-Mormons could not attend the funeral itself, for strict religious reasons—and ended up meeting dozens of new distant cousins I did not know I had. They weren’t my first cousins, of course—all second and third cousins, at best, I learned—but a lot of them were my age, and most of them had my last name. I was stunned! My small family had just ballooned in size!

Uncle Ern’s grave, after his death in August 1964, Spring City, Utah. Public domain photo

But it was my mother who was really blown away by all this. She found the whole concept of polygamy more than little distasteful—as alien to her small-town Southern worldview as if it had happened on Mars—and refused to talk about it. Her only comment was that at least Grandpa Ben, whom she adored, had been from the first family—the only legitimate family, in her view. The rest of them might have some shadowy claim to the family, but a highly dubious one—and she was not about to treat them as her family. She would be polite and smile, as was her upbringing, but that was the extent of her involvement. She was certainly well aware of how some men “strayed” and had children outside wedlock—that happened everywhere. But not in our living room, on her watch, would we dignify or discuss some shameful behavior.

For his part, Daddy said very little about it—he allowed as how some of the folks at the funeral were actually his cousins, and even seemed to know some of them by sight. But of course, it was all a bit stilted and stiff—they still called him Quay, his middle name, wherever it came from—and remembered him as a rambunctious cowboy teenager from a quarter-century earlier. Daddy was, after all, a Jack Mormon, a prodigal who might be Ben’s son and Ern’s nephew, after all, but was no longer “one of us”—and his family was downright different, down to the odd Southern accent we all spoke with. (Ever polite, we did not tell them what we thought of their accents…)

To me, the whole thing was just fascinating. There was no shame involved. As a budding historian, I simply wanted to know more details. All the details, the more lurid, the better! But those were a long time coming. And when I finally did get to piece together a fuller picture, it was a lot more complicated than I had even imagined.

Rasmus Justesen (1842-1917), father of Grandpa Ben and Uncle Ern, and a Mormon patriarch. Public domain photo

As it turned out, Grandpa Ben and his half-brother, Ern, were among the many sons of a Danish immigrant, Rasmus Justesen, who had made the long journey across the Atlantic a decade before the Civil War erupted. Rasmus had landed in 1852, with his parents, Lars and Karen Justesen, and brother Peter, for some reason at New Orleans, rather than New York, as I had surmised. The Justesens then made their way by steamboat north to Keokuk, Iowa, where they turned left and joined the Mormon trek by foot and covered wagon to the New Zion: the Great Salk Lake, in what was was now officially—just barely— Utah Territory. The Church paid for it …

I vaguely knew that part of Daddy’s family had immigrated from Denmark to the United States in the 19th century, but always assumed they had become Mormons after they arrived. Not true! It had never occurred to me that they might have converted to Mormonism before leaving Denmark—or that Mormon proselytization had been so extensive outside the United States that soon after the religion itself was founded. There was apparently an awful lot I did not know about U.S. history, although I was already widely read as a teenager, and devoured whatever history books came my way.

So far in my education at that point, the version of U.S. history I had been taught had been largely a semi-sanitized version of the Lost Cause and the War of Northern Aggression, as we sometimes jokingly called it. Utah might have been mentioned but was never talked about very much. I suspected that there was a lot my teachers weren’t telling me, but patiently read books other than the assigned texts, and hoped that by the time I got to college, I might find out a more complete picture and a more neutral set of teachers.

But what I did not know about my own family and larger U.S. history—admittedly, quite a bit—was about to be take a great leap forward, thanks to Daddy’s family. You may know that Mormons are renowned as the world’s most prodigious genealogists. They take it seriously—part of the devout, laborious process of praying their unconverted ancestors and relatives into heaven, I later learned.

After my Grandpa Ben died in 1967, after I was out of school at Chapel Hill, and married, one of Daddy’s “real” cousins sent us what came to be known around our household as the Book of Rasmus: a privately-generated compilation of the colorful histories of all the family members on the Justesen side from 1852 to the present day. Fifty years later, I still have that book—a large, leather-bound ledger, with rectangular horizontal pages and plenty of photographs and yes, “pedigree” pages for every family member. I still pull it out on occasion, when I run out of interesting things to read.

What an eye-opener! And it seems as fresh today as it was then … ever full of little surprises…

Next time: My great-great-grandfather Lars killed by Indians—and Great-grandpa Rasmus in prison stripes…