Christmas
Jeff Westover

What Christmas Was Like for Them

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In my world there are three seasons: baseball, Christmas and family history. These three things are a backdrop to my life as a husband, father, son, and grandfather.

It might be a bit unfair to call them seasons because for me none of them really begin and end. I always seem to be engaged in something connected to each of them. But rarely do those worlds ever collide.

Today they do in that I want to address Christmas of our forefathers and just what it was like for them.

My interest in Christmas is purely accidental. I was raised in a home where Christmas was grandly celebrated but it wasn’t until I became an instant father to the only 5 year old in the world who didn’t know of Santa Claus that I became something of a Christmas historian.

Knowing we wanted to have a large family, one of my first parental challenges was convincing Aubree that Christmas Eve did not mean opening presents. To me the future Christmas Eves of our family would be wrongfully spent if I didn’t straighten this out.

It took a letter to Santa, a response from an elf, and the daily magic of a dispatch from the North Pole via a fax machine to make that happen. Aubree ended up taking these faxes with her to school, spreading them around as kind of a jolly missionary and getting other kids to bug parents to call me so they could get the faxes for their children too.

Before long we were faxing all over town, then across the country, and later to different parts of the world every Christmas.

It was getting expensive until I discovered the Internet and put the effort online through a network of websites. Today MyMerryChristmas.com is one of the largest Christmas websites online and SantaUpdate.com is the oldest Santa tracking venue on the Internet.

Christmas brings people together. I was amazed in the early 1990s that people would fax Santa back sometimes to things that were mentioned in his updates.

They just wanted to share and they wanted to ask their own questions about Christmas. I learned long before social media ever came around how powerful the Internet could be in connecting people. I learned it through the backdrop of Christmas as we built our websites and developed our online skills.

As it has expanded I have had to continually study the history of the season. This did not begin as a joy to me but it became such when I saw that the work of being able to explain Christmas and share its history, traditions, legends and celebration would give me friends around the world.

This accidental endeavor has also given voice to my testimony of the Savior and an outlet to share the gospel of Christ in a different way.

It has given me as well a number of skills relative to research that has served other parts of my life, especially my work in family history. The ability to find facts, discover stories and present more in-depth information is vital to the work of sharing anything online.

Christmas, like most things, is different than people suppose because they are exposed to limited histories in school courses or agenda-driven history through modern media and movies.

For example, historians tell us that Christmas was dead in England before Charles Dickens produced A Christmas Carol. We know that is false.

Christmas was at the epicenter of debate for our Puritan Westover ancestors in Taunton, England in the 1500s and 1600s.

The dark ages has so corrupted the Church of England – and Christmas – that the season literally became a dangerous time to be on the streets.

Christmas was a free-for-all celebration by this point. It was a time where roving gangs had hijacked the quaint and neighborly tradition of wassailing and turned it into an opportunity to rob and plunder.

In many areas the priests of the church contributed to the misrule by allowing the pagan elements of winter solstice celebrations to continue. Role reversal was common as the “boy bishop” would take over the church and the priests would join the masses in the excess of partying.

These were seasons of riotous parties, widespread gambling and drinking, excesses in feasting, decorating and violence in the streets against non-participants, the aged and handicapped. There was widespread destruction of property and even sexual dalliances that would later be excused by the very priests who engaged in them.

The pre-Dickens Christmas was one of the many reasons for the Puritan uprising in England – and it had a profound effect on our family history.

When Jonah Westover began his family in Simsbury, Connecticut it is doubtful that he even celebrated Christmas. The Puritans of Boston very clearly banned Christmas for more than 50 years as the colonies of New England were established.

That is not to suggest, however, that Christmas was not celebrated at all.

While Governor Bradford himself recorded the story of chastising Puritan citizens found on the street on Christmas Day up to no good by playing games the fact of the matter was that while he could suppress the celebration of Christmas he could not entirely extinguish it.

Within the early American journals and media of the time there are evidences of family gatherings and private worship that occurred at Christmas even in Simsbury during the 1600s.

In fact, the idea of a “holiday season” was born of New England tradition. While Christmas may not have been a headline event Thanksgiving surely was.

It was our Puritan ancestors who developed the all American tradition of “pumpkin pye” and going over-the-river and through the woods to Grandfather’s house.

Thanksgiving then was a time declared by the governor or other royal authority. It usually came after a victory at war or some other great event that affected everyone. Thanksgiving could come at any time of the year and it was declared a time of public prayer and acknowledgement of God.

During these times there was no such thing as a “holiday” – or a day off.

That is why when the declaration of Thanksgiving went out by royal decree it became a big deal. Working for that day was out, worship was commanded and normal activity ceased to focus on whatever the reason.

Often the reason was a bounteous harvest.

The “first Thanksgiving”, as taught in grade school and on television in Charlie Brown’s Thanksgiving, was definitely the real deal. It happened. Maybe it didn’t happen exactly as we have been taught with turkey and all but it definitely happened.

And it repeated itself as a societal tradition year after year.

The reason is quite plain. The end of the harvest meant the onset of winter. And winter brought a change in routine and a great increase of disposable time. It was the one time of the year when family could finally gather at all. It is no wonder that it became celebratory in nature.

Our New England ancestors of the Westover family surely engaged in the reveling of the pumpkin pie. Newspaper clippings from the 1700s suggest that it was common to bake and consume at least 10 pumpkin pies per household at Thanksgiving.

That’s a lot of love for pumpkin – and an indication of how large their gatherings were.

In 1630, a writer wrote:

For pottage and puddings and custards and pies,
Our pumpkins and parsnips are common supplies:
We have pumpkins at morning and pumpkins at noon,
If it were not for pumpkins, we would be undoon.

Nearly a century later, the now-established American tradition of gathering family and celebrating with pumpkin pie was written of in this way:

Ah! On Thanksgiving Day, when from East and from West,
From the North and from South come the pilgrim and guest,
When the grey-haired New Englander sees round his board,
The old broken link of affection restored.
When the care-wearied man seeks his mother once more,
And the worn matron smiles where the girl smiled before,
What moistens the lip and what brightens the eye?
What calls back the past, like the rich Pumpkin Pie?

Over time, as New England populated away from the busy centers of Boston, diversity fractured the Christian church landscape.

Methodists, Baptists, Congregationalists and Universalists all celebrated Christmas but did so in different ways. Almost all were very different from the Christmases of their grandfathers in merry old England.

But their religion melded with their lifestyle of survival. It was a life of farming and hunting, of building, gathering and forging with steel, copper and other metal.

Caught up in it all were the principles of liberty and the fierce American spirit of Independence. Jonathan Westover, brother to grandfather Jonah Westover, Jr, moved the Westover clan to Sheffield, Massachusetts.

As a founder of the community he played a part in the establishment of a church there. He took a dim view of a forced fee proposed for all town citizens in order to pay the priest of the Church. That was the tradition and he wanted no part of it. He would not do it by force, he claimed he would do it “in a gospel way”.

The early churches of New England varied widely from the churches known from the past. Even when John Westover, the son of Jonah, Jr, became the clerk of the Church of England in Sheffield what that church was in 1750 was far different than the Church of England his great-grandfather, Gabriel Westover, fought against three generations before.

The Church of England in Sheffield celebrated Christmas and the Westovers of the mid-18th century were big participants.

Religion was a contentious subject because the growing farming communities of western Massachusetts were continually infused with more people from different countries. It was the German farmers who brought the traditions of the Christmas tree to America in the early 1700s and this tradition was happily adopted by nearly all New Englanders over the next 100 years.

George Washington saw the first Christmas trees in his life when fighting Hessian mercenaries on Christmas of 1776.

Washington was a Southerner who very famously celebrated Christmas. As the heir of a large landowner Washington was land rich and as such was basically American aristocracy. His Christmas traditions included sending away to Europe for the latest in fashions for gifts and large holiday parties at Mount Vernon.

He saw a very different Christmas leading the American Revolution in areas north of his Virginia plantation. Amongst his many troops were the Westover brothers of Massachusetts.

It was Washington’s Christmas at Valley Forge that taught him the mindset of the Northern Christmas. It was clearly a tradition of his New England troops, one held in the highest esteem.

But if we’re looking for the details of our ancestral Christmas in abundance we need look no further than our family of the 19th century.

That will be discussed in our next post to come out later this week.

Westover Family Christmas
Jeff Westover

The History of Family Christmas Past

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Westover Family ChristmasAs the holiday season approaches I cannot help but think with great appreciation how much more significant Christmas and Thanksgiving are to me thanks what I have learned of our family history.

I am especially grateful for those who left behind little memories of what these special days meant to them.

The image above was taken from the war letters of my Grandpa Carl, whose letters came home full of holes, much as the illustration shows. It was reflective of the times and his situation. But it was clearly important to him that he send his love though greetings home – and he sent lots of them.

I’m so grateful they survive to read now.

I have as well in my possession a few Christmas cards sent to me by my grandparents. I have many Christmas letters with poetry from Aunt Evie (treasures!). I cherish the Christmas video of my grandmother, and I really love this conversation between Grandma and Aunt Aldyth…

I am also so much more interested in the real meaning of Thanksgiving. I know now of our Puritan ancestors and how their frequent Thanksgivings were a call to family prayer.

I cannot say for certain what Christmas was like for our 19th century pioneer families. But I’m fairly certain that Grandma Electa Beal Westover was in the choir in St. George when Far, Far Away on Judea’s Plain was first performed in the then-new St. George Tabernacle. (You do know that story, don’t you?)

Wouldn’t it be neat to leave our grandchildren and great, great, great grandchildren something of the holidays from our generation?

That is the great hope in establishing the Westover Family Christmas Card Exchange.

Since announcing this last summer we have garnered a total of seven Westover family members who have signed up. But I’m hoping this little nudge will encourage more of you to sign-up and participate.

You see, I’m going to save every Christmas card from family this year and I’m going to call it historic. These were the brave souls – this Christmas card class of 2018 – that
started an enduring and great tradition.

Who are those seven brave souls? You’ll have to sign up to find out.

The list goes out on National Family History Day – ironically known as Thanksgiving Day – and those who sign up make history (and have a little fun).

Jeff Westover

Freeing the Spirits of Family

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I have been troubled by something for quite a while. This week I finally did something about it.

I released hundreds of names to the temple that I had held in reserve.

Over the course of the past five years I have worked with family and my ward members to do the temple work for hundreds of names. When the youth needed names for baptism, I had a ready supply. When we would go to the temple or when other family members would enquire we have had our family work to do.

I have stated before that my least favorite part of family history is the data mining of names and dates and part of that includes making names temple ready. My mother collected and organized thousands of names through her lines over the course of decades and all I have done with them is make them temple-ready. But doing so had caused my reserved names list to blossom.

Stubbornly I hoarded those names thinking I would get to them through the same old efforts of working with family and my ward groups. Instead of making headway with that list through these efforts the list has only grown.

I rationalized this with good things, of course. I want my family to have family names to take to the temple. I want to be able to support our ward and stake with work that needs to be done as well. I want to do some of this work myself.

I was also bothered with the idea that I might upset someone by doing this. After all, don’t my brothers and sisters and cousins deserve an opportunity to do this work as well?

They do. But, frankly, if they were all that interested in it I would have heard from them by now. Over five years I have tried over and over to engage others in the work of our family history — and what is temple work if it’s not family history? — but my success with those efforts has been very soft. They say that less than 2 percent of Church members are seeking out their family names and taking them to the temple. I would say our family participation rate has been about the same.

Why wait for them when we have other members of the family waiting for me?

All along I have been nagged by the thought that I was holding things up and not helping things out. I was baking only part of the cake.

In the end, isn’t the Temple the point? Aren’t the ordinance works the only point?

Could I be supressing the forward progression of loved ones only because I was sitting on names?

This week I set the captives free.

Finally, I can tell you, I am at peace with this. Never will I allow the names to pile up again. As soon as I get new ones I’m going to release them.

I still want folks to work with when it comes to these efforts. You know where to find me. From now on though I will be putting names in the express line and not holding back. There is so much work to be done and there is no time to hold back for spurious reasons.

The time is now.

I have come to think of my family in much broader terms these last five years. In five years time I’ve become a grandparent. I’ve watched my children mature into adults. I’ve lost my mother. I’ve engaged in this noble work and have come to know those family members of my past that made my life possible. The height, width, depth and breadth of who my family is, including my-law family, leaves me in awe and feeling burdened with responsibility.

I want to be able to face them all — now and into the future.

I will continue the work of outreach with my family and especially my children through this website and other efforts. I feel this is not only a critical work for our family on the other side but the revelatory nature of doing family history, the sacred learning that envelopes us as we work on these things, the new influences we feel and the higher teaching given to us through temple and family history work is, in my mind, one of the greatest parts of the gathering.

We tend to think the souls we’re helping are others. They are not. This work is for us. One way or the other, the work for “them” is going to get done — whether we do it or someone else does. But if we do it we gain that much more. There will be no spirit prison for us if we do this. If we neglect it, we do it at great peril.

I sometimes wonder where the ceiling is in these lessons. I keep thinking that maybe I won’t continually experience something new and exciting as I press forward. But now I don’t think there is a limit. I believe Heavenly Father so wants to bless us that what lies in store cannot be predicted, anticipated or even imagined.

We are told that. We are promised that. But like all things associated with the gospel until we put that faith in action — not just sticking our toe into the water but jumping head first into the pool — we will never reap the blessings that faith promises.

I tell you, those blessings come. They come in not only great abundance but in ways that will stun you and leave you breathless.

I hope those names now freed are experiencing the same kind of blessings now for their faith on the other side.

Mormon Battalion
Jeff Westover

Getting to Know Albert Smith

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Albert Smith

Ancestral Line to Albert Smith

All year long I’ve made reference to a video (or two) coming out about Albert Smith. It is still a work in progress.

The challenge stems from what to include and what to leave out in telling of his story. Thanks to Albert’s journals and to a long life lived so close to events of Church and Utah history there is a great deal of information. There is little of the 19th century Mormon experience that Albert didn’t have.

He came from a religious family. That led to his conversion sometime in the mid-1830s, a time that saw him join the Church in Ohio and one that put him on a slow path to Nauvoo.

His intent was to settle his family where the Saints were gathering in Missouri. What stopped him? Something called the extermination order by Governor Boggs.

Around 1840 Albert and his family arrived in Nauvoo. They joined the Nauvoo first ward.

He joined the Nauvoo Legion.

Albert was called on a mission to New York in 1842, returning nearly a year later in 1843.

He helped to build the Nauvoo Temple. He was friends with Wilford Woodruff. He knew the Prophet Joseph.

Both Albert, and his wife, Esther, received patriarchal blessings from Joseph Smith, Sr.

They were there when the Prophet and his brother, Hyrum, were martyred.

Like others in Nauvoo, they abandoned the home they had built and the land they had developed when they were pushed west by a mob. They received their endowments in the Nauvoo temple in January 1846, before being among some of the first to head west.

Mormon Battalion

The 50th anniversary of the Mormon Battalion held 4 years after Albert died, in 1896.

Upon hearing of a need for 500 men for the Mormon Battalion, Albert and his 17 year old son, Azariah, volunteered.

They separated from their families for a full year, marched all the way to San Diego. Both would come home from the experience with severe injuries. Azariah would get thrown and kicked in the head by a horse and Albert was wounded when run over by a bull – three ribs years later were found to still be broken and separated from his sternum.

As they were headed to Salt Lake in 1847 they were told there was little food there and their company was admonished to go back to California. Azariah did return, for a season, working for a period at Sutter’s Fort where he would become part of the group that discovered gold there, ushering in the gold rush of California.

But Albert, anxious to return to his family, pressed on to Salt Lake, becoming one of the few pioneers of 1847 to arrive from the west.

Like all others, the Smiths set out to work to get settled in Salt Lake City. They had a terrible go of it the first few years. But there were miracles. In fact, the famous miracle of the seagulls actually happened to Albert Smith. He writes:

“When I got in sight of my grain I saw that it was covered with sea gulls. I stopped until they flew to another part of the field. What was my joy and surprise when I went on to the place and found every cricket destroyed. There was not one live one to be found while dead ones laid in heaps where the gulls had thrown them up when they done that they would fill themselves again and so continue to do. The Indians said that they were new birds that they never saw them before. I raised a large crop for 10 acres. I might mention a great many interposition of providence in our behalf without which we might have all perished.”

The next spring, Albert and family were called to be part of a pioneering group to settle Sanpete County – the first settlement south of Salt Lake to be established. I love the way Albert describes the general reaction to their new home:

“When we arrived at the place that is Manti, there was a large number in the camp that were wonderful disappointed with the place. Some went to Sever to see if they could find a better place to settle, but it was decided that this was the place where we was sent and that here we would settle.”

It would be his home for the next 43 years. There he would be known as “Father Smith”, a beloved member of the community who was older, most experienced in the church and faithful to the very core.

Again, all that he experienced in the coming years seemed to be drawn from the legendary experience of Mormonism in the 19th century.

It was there that Albert lost his first wife, Esther in 1856. He remarried almost right away and then, a short time later, he took on a plural wife who didn’t even speak English.

Almost overnight he went from having just 5 in his home to having 14 people under his care, including his disabled son Azariah, who was still suffering from fits of epilepsy from his head injury in California.

The crickets came back and the miracle of the seagulls did not repeat itself in Manti. Each year Albert would faithfully record his farm production and some years he grew nothing because of the pestilence or the lack of water. One year he records taking a trip by wagon to Bountiful to glean from fields of successful crops there, just so he could care for his family over the winter.

The life of plural marriage was not easy on Albert. In fact, after his second wife had pestered him enough for a divorce he gave it to her in 1865.

Albert SmithThroughout all this Albert lived faithfully and served in the ward and the community in Manti. He fought Indians and tried to be an influence to peace, an unpopular position to hold among anxious settlers. There were many skirmishes, and many people on both sides died. Albert preached for peace every time.

He continued his associations with Church leadership. When visiting authorities would visit he attended meetings and made a record of what they said. As first the temple arrived in St. George, Albert took note of the growing understanding of the doctrine of sealing families and vowed to take part.

He paid a professional genealogist to seek out the names of his ancestors and waited four long years for results. As the announcement was made for the Manti Temple Albert continued in those efforts in preparation, lending money and labor to that building as well.

To that end, Albert dedicated the last several years of his life to temple service and seeing that as many as 1500 of his family names were recorded as receiving ordinances under his hand or direction. He remained connected and devoted as well to his living descendants.

But for even all this I haven’t even touched on the lessons of the life of Albert Smith. That I will save for the video.

He was an extraordinary man, a man who lived the Gospel stubbornly, and a man whose understanding of the atonement led to one astonishing act of compassion that leads me to tears each time I think of it.

Right now, honestly, I’m trying to find a way to tell that part of Albert’s story.

It is tender. It is sacred. It is a necessary and, as far as I can tell, so far an untold story of our family history that needs to be shared and appreciated.

That part of Albert’s story is NOT told in his journal. Nevertheless, I would encourage you to head over to WestoverGenealogy.org to read the many pages of Albert’s journal.

I believe there is great value in getting to know him through his unique form of expression and in his own telling of his story.

Westover Family Ranch
Jeff Westover

Revelations from a Trip to Rexburg

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I just returned from a visit to the Westover Family Ranch in Rexburg, Idaho. I was there to attend a board meeting of the ranch. I learned a great deal.

I must confess that my own personal time spent at the ranch has been limited. As a child I heard much about the ranch. But it wasn’t until just a few years ago that I attended a family event there.

After the business of the board was done I attended a nice family meeting and then began a short period of visiting. During the course of the morning I heard many stories I had not heard before — stories of my uncles and my grandfather, all of who had a hand in building the facilities there at the ranch and all who sacrificed much more than just money in bringing the thing about.

As I heard these stories I was impressed with the need to record them. There is so much of our recent family history of the past 100 years sewn within the walls of the Westover Family Ranch yet they reside only in the memories of those who tell them. It is a great history, one we should all know and celebrate.

My feelings about the ranch have always been ambivalent. After all, I did not grow up there and because I have not attended all the many reunions held there, I have not had much invested in it. It has been, in my mind, just a plot of dirt in Idaho.

I have been wrong about my feelings.

I should have been more interested. I should have attended some of those events when it was in my power to do so. I should have been more faithful to the idea that it is a place prepared for me by family members for sacred purposes.

This weekend I learned the two purposes of the ranch are to regularly gather the family and to preserve the history of the family.

That is nothing to be ambivalent about. In fact, sitting where I am now in my life, I am inspired by how visionary my grandfather and uncles were in their efforts.

How can I become a better part of the ranch and it’s mission?

The actual history of the ranch dates back to the 1880s and the founding of Rexburg. Back then it was the homestead of the William and Ruth Westover family.

When William and Ruth passed away in the early 20th century the ranch land passed through a few hands but a portion of it was always kept within the family. Later generations worked to continue a family presence there and to build the Westover Family Ranch, as it is now known, in the 1970s.

Next year, 2019, the Westover Family Ranch celebrates 40 years.

I believe between now and next summer much can be done to celebrate that accomplishment and to make a record of its impact on the modern history of the Westover family.

Can you and will you help? I am specifically looking to interview those with an intimate knowledge of how the ranch effort came together in the 1960s and 1970s. I want to collect the stories of those who worked on it and to learn the details of what transpired in building the ranch. Please contact me.

I would like to collect photos, films, and documents relative to the ranch.

I would like to prepare and archive all of this information both here on this site and then to present it at reunions scheduled to be held by various branches of the family in 2019 and 2020.

My quick day trip to Rexburg also revealed some sad facts to me:

1. I don’t know as many members of the family as I should and they do not know me. That is not good.
2. While many members of the family appreciate our history they do not know it.

Those things fall to me. I can and I will do something about it.

I hope those who read these pages will join me in the efforts of celebrating better the Westover Family Ranch and participating in what happens there. I hope to see a recommitment to the ideals set forth by those who pounded nails, made plans, contributed money, time and great effort to build the ranch and make it what it is for us today.

I hope to expand the understanding of why that piece of dirt in Idaho matters. I believe it to be a place where every one of the descendants of William and Ruth Westover should visit and participate in events there.

I learned that what is there at the ranch is not all that the generation of my grandparents intended. They wanted it to be more. They wanted to include a building that would specifically archive the family’s history and provide a place for it to be taught.

I believe that our generation could and should make that happen. I believe taking the ranch to the next level – well, really, to fulfill what was originally intended – is something we owe to those who came before and to our children and grandchildren here after.

If they could pull it off, we can pull it off – and we should.

If you have been ambivalent about the ranch, please join me in making a commitment to no longer feeling that way. Turn your heart.

Miracles have and are happening there and that is for a reason. They are every bit as important as the miracles we have experienced relative to our work family history. They belong together and we need those miracles in our lives.