Heritage

I have been searching for information on my father's grandparents this week.  It has been eye-opening to say the least!  I have known stories of them, but I think I paid more attention to my own grandparents and parents.  While putting their stories together and trying to summarize some of their lives, I began to think about how my own life would be "summarized" when I have passed away.  My two great-grandfathers on my dad's line are very accomplished men.  His father's father was the son of Brigham Young and Emily Dow Partridge, was raised in the Lion House, was a very confident and opinionated man, went to engineering school back east, became an architect, finished the Salt Lake Temple's construction, designed about 300 buildings for the church, married my great-grandmother and took a second wife, who had to leave to Mexico when polygamy was terminated, and had many wonderful experiences in his life that were recorded by family and even two non-family scholars wrote his history!  His wife, Alice Naomi Dowden, has very little written about her, but I gather from a letter and my father's recollections that she was a lovely mother, grandmother, neighbor, and family member.  My father's mother's father, John Hagman, joined the church in Sweden while learning to be a tailor.  He gathered to Salt Lake City and married Ingri Hanson, who had joined the church and when she moved to Utah, was disowned by her father who was the prince of Sweden and they had her name removed from all records as his child.

From these four ancestors, I realize that our descendants will only have information that they can read about to know us!  It makes me want to write a short history that I would like to be remembered by!  And it also shows me that the sweet great-grandmother that didn't have "exciting" stories, maybe not even that exciting of a life, was still important in raising children and loving family and friends.  Stories may define our life to those who never met us, but I want my testimony and my soul to be more prominent than a funny or circumstantial story to define me.  I have really come to appreciate these four people who made my life possible.  I have pictures of them below:

Joseph Don Carlos Young

       

 Alice Naomi Dowden Young

John Hagman

                                                          

Ingri Maximilian Hanson Hagman