The Man Behind the Discourse


Book Description

Who was King Follett? When he was fatally injured digging a well in Nauvoo in March 1844, why did Joseph Smith use his death to deliver the monumental doctrinal sermon now known as the King Follett Discourse? Much has been written about the sermon, but little about King. Although King left no personal writings, Joann Follett Mortensen, King’s third great-granddaughter, draws on more than thirty years of research in civic and Church records and in the journals and letters of King’s peers to piece together King’s story from his birth in New Hampshire and moves westward where, in Ohio, he and his wife, Louisa, made the life-shifting decision to accept the new Mormon religion. From that point, this humble, hospitable, and hardworking family followed the Church into Missouri where their devotion to Joseph Smith was refined and burnished. King was the last Mormon prisoner in Missouri to be released from jail. According to family lore, King was one of the Prophet’s bodyguards. He was also a Danite, a Mason, and an officer in the Nauvoo Legion. After his death, Louisa and their children settled in Iowa where some associated with the Cutlerities and the RLDS Church; others moved on to California. One son joined the Mormon Battalion and helped found Mormon communities in Utah, Nevada, and Arizona. While King would have died virtually unknown had his name not been attached to the discourse, his life story reflects the reality of all those whose faith became the foundation for a new religion. His biography is more than one man’s life story. It is the history of the early Restoration itself.




Finding Clara


Book Description

The one thing I knew for sure was, the more family history I found, the more I knew there was more to find! The question was asked if our ancestors came from England on the Mayflower. I answered no, “Our English ancestors sailed into Cambridge Harbor, Massachusetts in 1638, instead!” Finding Clara is a result of a single genealogical lead, that became a family mystery in 1972. Jeri Fuller’s great-grandfather, Charles Emery Fuller and first wife, Martha had a daughter named Clara in 1875. She was born in Northfield, Minnesota. My mother did not know that he had been previously married, because there was no family history, stories or photos handed down of Clara or her mother. Jeri solved the mystery of finding Clara, old school, by writing to relatives and obtaining copies of vital records. She provides intimate details of Clara’s life, where she lived, attended college, who she married and her children, after she traveled to Northfield in 1997. Her get-up and get-personal research method gets results. While completing Clara’s biography she found that Charles Emery Fuller had served in the Civil War. She tells where she obtained a copy of his mustered-in and mustered-out record and the narrative of where his regiment served. Finding Clara reveals the discovery of numerous Fuller family connections to Northfield’s unique history. One ancestor witnessed Northfield’s famous attempted robbery of the First National Bank by Frank and Jesse James and the Younger Brothers in 1876. Some ancestors served as volunteer fire fighters for Northfield’s Hook and Ladder No. 1, some attended either Carleton or St. Olaf College. The connections of her family to these places and events are amazing. Jeri recounts her Fuller family history, alongside America’s history from colonial New England to the eighteenth-century in the Mid-West. She tells of how Chauncey C. Olin supported the Underground Railroad in Wisconsin. She goes on to solve seven family history mysteries. Using the strategy of her family’s naming convention, she identified her Violet Barber who was born in 1796. Her inspiring stories of tenacity and perseverance are insightful. Her research located her family’s American Revolutionary Soldier, who moved to Canton, New York in the early 1800s. She includes eleven generations of her Fuller family tree. The staff at the Flint Public Library in Middleton, Massachusetts provided a map locating Thomas Fuller’s home built in 1684. These stories in Finding Clara can assist any novice or expert genealogist find inspiration to complete their family histories.







Untidy Origins


Book Description

On a summer day in 1846--two years before the Seneca Falls convention that launched the movement for woman's rights in the United States--six women in rural upstate New York sat down to write a petition to their state's constitutional convention, demanding "equal, and civil and political rights with men." Refusing to invoke the traditional language of deference, motherhood, or Christianity as they made their claim, the women even declined to defend their position, asserting that "a self evident truth is sufficiently plain without argument." Who were these women, Lori Ginzberg asks, and how might their story change the collective memory of the struggle for woman's rights? Very few clues remain about the petitioners, but Ginzberg pieces together information from census records, deeds, wills, and newspapers to explore why, at a time when the notion of women as full citizens was declared unthinkable and considered too dangerous to discuss, six ordinary women embraced it as common sense. By weaving their radical local action into the broader narrative of antebellum intellectual life and political identity, Ginzberg brings new light to the story of woman's rights and of some women's sense of themselves as full members of the nation.