Grandma Lied!

Last August Tracy and I decided to take her two kids on a little genealogy field trip.  I realize that genealogy may seem a little boring to teenagers, so we were careful to keep it interesting.  Mark is 12 and Shannon is 16, so I thought a story about someone who was their age might make a good start. First up was a trip to the Davis County Courthouse in Farmington, Utah.

Shannon, Tracy & Mark

When we arrived, I told them the story of how Grandma and Grandpa Jespersen eloped to this very courthouse in 1918. That got their attention.  I told them that Grandma and Grandpa met while they were at the Smithsonian School in Ogden, where they were both receiving vocational training (Grandma's dad died when she was not yet 13, so her mother needed some help with the family finances).  Great Grandma Fox would not have been very happy to find that the daughter she had just spent all this tuition money on would be leaving the nest, so they ran off to another county to get married. Since Grandpa had to report for bootcamp the next week (he was drafted in WWI), I'm sure they felt some urgency to get married before he left; however, they were so scared of Grandma Fox, that they both went home to their own houses after the wedding and didn't tell their parents for a week!

We went into the courthouse, and a very nice gentleman who followed us in asked if he could help us.  I explained that our grandparents had been married here in 1918, and we were hoping to get a copy of the marriage license.  He told us that they usually just order up the digital file, but since we'd come all this way in person, he would retrieve the original document for us. He took us down the hall and opened up a little room in which they kept all the licenses and minutes of the county meetings. He climbed to the very top of the ladder and retrieved the marriage license.

Tracy and I each paid for a copy of the license, and with some excitement began poring over the document. We both looked at each other at the same moment when we read the age of our grandmother on the license.  Grandma lied! We knew they'd been married the day before her 17th birthday, but she stated on the license that she was 18!

After thanking the staff at the courthouse, we wandered around this beautiful building; Mark and Shannon were drawn to the stained glass windows and the memorial to the soldiers who have served from the county.

Mark expended some energy in front of the courthouse on this colorful bison.

Seeing the place where Alta Eugenia Miller and Arthur Henry Jespersen eloped was a great start to our field trip.