Today one of my nephews got married. He and his bride-to-be chose to be married in the little Utah town of Manti. Manti is where my mother was born and raised. My family has a pretty rich heritage in this small town. My great, great grandfather (I think that's the correct amount of greats) was one of the first settlers of the area. My grandfather was the superintendent of the school district and well known in the community.
My husband and I made the 2 hour drive to Manti and just happened to arrive in the area with time to spare before the wedding ceremony. I didn't have the exact address of the home where my mother lived as a girl, but had a vague idea of what part of town it was in. After driving up and down several streets, I saw the large,, two story home that my great great grandfather had lived in. I remembered that my mother's house was just down the street.
On the next corner, where I was now sure my mother's house was, sat a house with white, aluminum siding. It looked like the same house in pictures that I have seen and it was in the same location that I remembered seeing it several years before. But the white, aluminum siding puzzled me. My mother's original house was built out of stone from a local quarry. Many of the other houses and buildings in Manti are built out of the same stone. With the aluminum siding, the house that I saw just wasn't my mother's childhood home. It was kind of sad.
3 comments:
He was your great-grandfather, William Thomas Reid, 1830-1904. He was born in Ireland and died in Manti. His father, John Reid, our great-great-grandfather, never immigrated to the U.S. from Ireland.
I was thinking about Frederick Walter Cox, father of Mary Adelaide Cox. Wasn't she William Thomas Reid's wife? I guess I better get out my genealogy and get the facts straight.
You are right that Mary Adelaide Cox
was William T's wife, so that may well have been Frederick Cox's house, which would have been very large, since he had five wives and they all lived together instead of spread out all over the state. I was just thinking of the Reid side, not the Cox side. One of these days I should take a drive to Manti. I haven't been there since my BYU days.
Post a Comment