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I Had Come Home | Episode 28 · Stories That Live In Us

• 0:01
  Crista Cowan: Stories that Live In Us is a podcast that inspires you to form deep connections with your family, past, present and future.
• 0:09
  Crista Cowan: I'm Crista Cowan, known online as The Barefoot Genealogist.
• 0:13
  Crista Cowan: I've spent my whole life discovering the power of family history and I know that sharing the stories that live in you can change everything.
• 0:21
  Crista Cowan: Can change everything.
• 0:23
  Crista Cowan: In 2005, I stepped off a train platform in Glasgow, scotland, and immediately burst into tears, which was odd because I was on a business trip.
• 0:33
  Crista Cowan: As a matter of fact, the man that I was there to meet was a professor at a university, and I had never met him before, but we'd communicated frequently via email.
• 0:43
  Crista Cowan: He walked up to me, this round man with a cigar in his mouth and a sports coat with patches on the elbows and in a very thick Scottish brogue.
• 0:53
  Crista Cowan: He said welcome to Scotland.
• 0:54
  Crista Cowan: You're Crista, aren't you?
• 0:56
  Crista Cowan: And I stood there weeping and he said tell me what you're feeling.
• 1:02
  Crista Cowan: And I said I feel like I just came home, which was odd because I had never been to Scotland before.
• 1:09
  Crista Cowan: He said well, you have Scottish ancestry, don't you?
• 1:13
  Crista Cowan: And I said I don't know.
• 1:16
  Crista Cowan: And he said aren't you a genealogist?
• 1:19
  Crista Cowan: Which, of course, then led us to back to his house, where I opened up my computer and pulled up my family tree and discovered that, yes, in fact, I do have Scottish ancestry.
• 1:30
  Crista Cowan: Now here's why I didn't know that I have been doing family history since I was a kid.
• 1:37
  Crista Cowan: You've heard me talk about that, but what you might not know is that of my four grandparents, one of them has a very, very well researched family tree.
• 1:48
  Crista Cowan: My dad's mom came from very large families, very active in the LDS church, and family history was very important to them, and so a lot of work, a lot of research had been done on that family tree.
• 2:06
  Crista Cowan: I had inherited that research, but I'd never paid attention to it before, and so what I discovered, sitting at that farm table with that Scottish professor in Glasgow on that day in 2005, was that my grandmother's great-grandfather was born in Scotland.
• 2:23
  Crista Cowan: His name was Samuel Mulliner.
• 2:24
  Crista Cowan: He was born in January of 1809.
• 2:27
  Crista Cowan: In 1830, shortly after getting married to a widowed woman with two small children, the two of them decided they wanted to immigrate to Australia.
• 2:38
  Crista Cowan: Now there was an economic downturn in Scotland and his father was going to lose the family business, so Samuel and his wife decided to give most of their savings to his father to save the business, and they only had enough money left to immigrate as far as Canada.
• 2:56
  Crista Cowan: They brought those two children to Canada.
• 2:59
  Crista Cowan: They had two more children while living there.
• 3:01
  Crista Cowan: Eventually they immigrated down into Ohio.
• 3:04
  Crista Cowan: Then they ended up out in Illinois.
• 3:08
  Crista Cowan: Now, in about 1839, samuel decided, because of some religious obligations that he felt to go back to Scotland, and he arrived back in Scotland eight years after having left.
• 3:24
  Crista Cowan: Having believed, when he left, that he was never going to see his family again his parents, his siblings, his aunts and uncles and cousins he arrived back in Scotland and had the opportunity to spend almost a year with them there before coming back to the United States.
• 3:42
  Crista Cowan: While he was there, he became the first missionary in Scotland for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and he brought back with him some of his aunts, one of his brothers, several Scottish individuals who had joined the church while he was there, and they became the first group of Mormon pioneers who, instead of sailing into a port on the East Coast, sailed into the port of New Orleans and then switched to a steamer ship and went up the Mississippi River to join the body of the church in Nauvoo, illinois.
• 4:19
  Crista Cowan: Now, I knew none of this when I stepped off that train platform in Glasgow.
• 4:27
  Crista Cowan: All I knew was that I felt like I had just come home.
• 4:33
  Crista Cowan: After having been raised in California and gone to high school in Oregon and Washington, I finished college and moved to Utah, and the day I moved into my little condo in Pleasant Grove, I walked out onto the balcony.
• 4:59
  Crista Cowan: The first morning I was there and looked up at Mount Timpanogos and felt like I had just come home, because I knew that my grandmother's mother had been born in Pleasant Grove, utah, and that my grandmother's father had been born in Lehi Utah, and that every day of their lives they had looked up at that same mountain.
• 5:20
  Crista Cowan: What I didn't realize was that that great-grandfather of mine, born in Lehi Utah, was the grandson of Samuel Mulliner, and now I had more stories to explore Now about that same time.
• 5:34
  Crista Cowan: As I started exploring more about the life of Samuel, based on that trip to Scotland for work, I discovered that he had also helped settle Lehi Utah.
• 5:45
  Crista Cowan: He had been one of the founding families here in this valley where I now live, where the ancestry offices are headquartered, and I felt another instant connection to him that I hadn't known, even was available to me before that, and that's one of the things about family history that I love is that there are always more branches of our family tree to explore.
• 6:11
  Crista Cowan: There's always another line, another ancestor, another set of stories.
• 6:16
  Crista Cowan: And let me tell you, there was a set of stories to come with Samuel, and as I was uncovering that and discovering him, I decided wouldn't it be a neat thing if, in 2009, we have a reunion of all of his descendants to commemorate the 200th anniversary of his birth?
• 6:37
  Crista Cowan: And what if we do it right here in Lehi, utah, in this town that he helped found?
• 6:42
  Crista Cowan: If you ever hear yourself say we should plan a reunion, just go take a nap.
• 6:47
  Crista Cowan: I'm convinced that we think these grandiose ideas and we don't realize how much work goes into it.
• 6:53
  Crista Cowan: Now, I say that mostly in jest, because I love family reunions, but they are a lot of work.
• 6:59
  Crista Cowan: I had a three-year head start on that work.
• 7:03
  Crista Cowan: The first task was let's identify all of the descendants of Samuel.
• 7:08
  Crista Cowan: The first thing I uncovered was that, after he had those two girls in Canada with his first wife and then raised them and then made his way to Illinois and then to Nebraska and then eventually across the plains with the Mormon pioneers into Utah, he ultimately fathered 18 children.
• 7:28
  Crista Cowan: Those 18 children produced 98 grandchildren, one of which was my dad's grandfather, victor, and I knew my grandpa Victor.
• 7:42
  Crista Cowan: He was around when I was a little girl.
• 7:45
  Crista Cowan: He used to take me on rides in his rickety pickup truck around Los Angeles.
• 7:50
  Crista Cowan: At one point my parents stopped letting me ride with him because he didn't believe in stoplights.
• 7:54
  Crista Cowan: He thought they were just suggestions.
• 7:56
  Crista Cowan: He was a character and he was a storyteller, and I loved my Grandpa Victor but somehow storyteller, and I loved my grandpa Victor, but somehow, in all the stories he told me, it never clicked with me as a child that he was one of 98 grandchildren on his dad's side of the family.
• 8:16
  Crista Cowan: It's not even counting the cousins on his mom's side of the family 98 grandchildren born to Samuel.
• 8:23
  Crista Cowan: Well, once I identified all 98 of those grandchildren and the family had done a pretty good job of keeping track of them, so I had that information the next task was to find the next generation, who are the great-grandchildren.
• 8:35
  Crista Cowan: So I set out on what is called a descendancy research project and I had a timetable, because I started it in 2006 after that trip to Scotland and I wanted to have this reunion in 2009.
• 8:49
  Crista Cowan: By the time, I had to draw a line in the sand and say we've got to send out invitations for this reunion.
• 8:57
  Crista Cowan: I had identified 6,800 descendants from one man born 200 years earlier.
• 9:06
  Crista Cowan: That kind of blew my mind.
• 9:09
  Crista Cowan: Now, to be fair, not all 6,800 came to the reunion.
• 9:13
  Crista Cowan: As a matter of fact, it was less than 300 that came to the reunion.
• 9:16
  Crista Cowan: But we were able to have a two-day celebration.
• 9:19
  Crista Cowan: It was an opportunity where my dad was able to reconnect with some of his first cousins and some of his second cousins that he hadn't seen since Mulliner family reunions when he was a kid.
• 9:28
  Crista Cowan: It was just a really enjoyable experience and a great opportunity for us to honor this ancestor and to see what stories other people in the family had.
• 9:40
  Crista Cowan: Because that's the thing about families, especially big families, is that different pieces of the story get passed down in different branches of the family tree.
• 9:50
  Crista Cowan: Sometimes it's because one person inherited all the photographs, or one person used to spend the most amount of time with grandpa, or one person was the oldest in the family and was very intentional about passing the stories they heard down to the next generation, where others might not have been.
• 10:08
  Crista Cowan: And so when you gather families back together for reunions, one of the things that happens is all of those little pieces that got spread around the family start to get put back together.
• 10:20
  Crista Cowan: And that's what that reunion back together and that's what that reunion was the beginning of was all of the pieces being put back together.
• 10:30
  Crista Cowan: And one of the things that happened from that was that I realized that Samuel was a lot more than just the scant little stories that we had heard about his leaving Scotland, immigrating to Canada, immigrating to the US and ultimately coming out west.
• 10:45
  Crista Cowan: He was a character, he was an entrepreneur, he was an inventor, he was the very first tanner west of the Mississippi, he was a shoemaker, he was a wonderful provider for his family, he worked hard, he had several jobs, he started a couple of mills.
• 11:10
  Crista Cowan: I mean, he just was always working to provide not just for his family but for his community as well.
• 11:17
  Crista Cowan: And these stories started to come out as we started collecting the cousins.
• 11:22
  Crista Cowan: Now there was something else that happened as we started collecting the cousins.
• 11:26
  Crista Cowan: One of the really fun things that happened right about that same time was that Facebook opened up to the general public.
• 11:33
  Crista Cowan: Of course, in the early days Facebook was only available for university students, but when it opened up to the general public.
• 11:39
  Crista Cowan: One of the first Facebook groups that I created was a Samuel Mulliner Descendants Facebook group and I started collecting cousins online.
• 11:48
  Crista Cowan: Now, those messages are always a little awkward.
• 11:50
  Crista Cowan: You don't know me, but here's how we're related and I happen to know who you are and who your parents and grandparents are.
• 11:56
  Crista Cowan: But people were very gracious and often responded and joined the Facebook group and often responded and joined the Facebook group.
• 12:07
  Crista Cowan: And one of the things that I watched happen in that group was how people who I had invited to join maybe somebody out in California and somebody up in Idaho and out in Arizona, someone out in New York these cousins that I was collecting as they came into this group, some of them started recognizing each other.
• 12:20
  Crista Cowan: Wait, why are you here?
• 12:22
  Crista Cowan: I'm related to Samuel Mulliner, I am too.
• 12:25
  Crista Cowan: Turns out, these two individuals had been fishing buddies when they had been young fathers.
• 12:30
  Crista Cowan: Again, what are you doing here?
• 12:33
  Crista Cowan: Oh, I'm a descendant of Samuel Mulliner, so am I?
• 12:36
  Crista Cowan: Well, turns out, those two individuals had, you know, worked together at a job when they were, you know, shortly before they retired.
• 12:47
  Crista Cowan: Another incident was we found out that my dad's mission president, from when he had served a church mission, he was a member of this family and for me personally, one of the most important connections I made because of Samuel was one of my college roommates was also a descendant of his and we were able to reconnect after not having seen each other or spoken in years.
• 13:12
  Crista Cowan: So the serendipity of that was not an insignificant part of this experience for me, and it was always connected to Samuel, to the fact that we were part of this family of his that I was gathering and helping identify.
• 13:29
  Crista Cowan: In the midst of all of that, my mom, who is not his descendant because it's my dad's side of the family.
• 13:36
  Crista Cowan: She is, however, an English teacher and she decided she wanted to work with me to write a biography about Samuel's life, to make sure we captured all of these stories.
• 13:47
  Crista Cowan: And so my mom and I made a trip back to Scotland and we went to record offices to make sure we found all the birth records for him and his siblings.
• 13:59
  Crista Cowan: We went to, we drove to the very north of Scotland, which is where Samuel's mother was from, and we found the church and we found the cemetery and we became acquainted with the land that created him.
• 14:13
  Crista Cowan: And there is something significant.
• 14:17
  Crista Cowan: I had felt it that first time I stepped off that train platform in Glasgow, I felt it as I walked through the churchyard up in Wick with my mom.
• 14:28
  Crista Cowan: There is something significant about walking in the footsteps of your ancestors, about being in the space that created them, the land that made them, the air that they breathed.
• 14:42
  Crista Cowan: I can't describe it unless you have felt it.
• 14:45
  Crista Cowan: That's the best I can do, but it's something that I encourage, and it doesn't matter if your family came from Scotland or if your family came from Colorado.
• 14:53
  Crista Cowan: Take the opportunity if you can, because something almost tangible connects us to those people through those places.
• 15:05
  Crista Cowan: And so, as my mom and I went on this trip, this research trip through Scotland, I was able to feel those feelings again.
• 15:14
  Crista Cowan: But we were also able to uncover more stories about Samuel by the time we came home.
• 15:20
  Crista Cowan: We dug into research libraries at Brigham Young University and the University of Utah.
• 15:25
  Crista Cowan: We went to the Utah State Historical Society.
• 15:28
  Crista Cowan: We went to the LDS Church Historical Society All of these resources that we had to dig into more information about him, and one of the things that we uncovered was that he had actually been one of the few Mormon pioneers who had kept a journal during his crossing of the plains.
• 15:49
  Crista Cowan: It was a significant part of church history.
• 15:53
  Crista Cowan: It was also now a significant part of our family history.
• 15:57
  Crista Cowan: So as my mom and I wrote this biography about him, there was one other story about him that came out that became significant and impactful to me.
• 16:08
  Crista Cowan: If you don't know about the history of the Mormon church, they were settled in Nauvoo, illinois, for quite a while.
• 16:13
  Crista Cowan: When the head of the church was murdered, the church members were driven out of Illinois by some angry mobs and had to cross the river in the middle of winter, and they were a lot of them in really destitute situations because they had to leave their homes and most of their possessions behind.
• 16:32
  Crista Cowan: Ultimately, they ended up in a place called Council Bluffs, iowa.
• 16:37
  Crista Cowan: After crossing that state and finding some temporary refuge there, samuel managed to bring his family, but one of the things that he did is, instead of staying in that settlement that that group of individuals called Winter Quarters, he decided to take his small family north a little bit and see if he couldn't find work.
• 17:00
  Crista Cowan: I mentioned that he was very entrepreneurial and enterprising, and this was just another example of that.
• 17:08
  Crista Cowan: He got outside of the community and was able to bring money and resources into the community because of this move.
• 17:16
  Crista Cowan: One of the very first things he did was he earned enough money to get a wagon and a team of oxen, because the ultimate plan was to come west.
• 17:27
  Crista Cowan: They didn't know exactly always where they were heading, but west was the goal.
• 17:31
  Crista Cowan: And so he earned a team of oxen and a wagon and was ready to take his family west the next spring.
• 17:38
  Crista Cowan: And the leadership of the church actually came to him and asked him if he would donate that team of oxen and that wagon to another couple of families to use to go west.
• 17:51
  Crista Cowan: And he did it without hesitation.
• 17:54
  Crista Cowan: And so then he spent another summer and fall and winter earning enough money to purchase another team of oxen and another wagon so that the following spring he could take his family west.
• 18:08
  Crista Cowan: And again the leadership of the church came to him and asked him if he would donate that to some other families so that they could make the trip.
• 18:18
  Crista Cowan: And he did without hesitation.
• 18:20
  Crista Cowan: A third time he earned enough money to bought the team of oxen, bought the wagon and again a third time the leadership of the church asked him to donate that and he did without hesitation.
• 18:37
  Crista Cowan: So one of the stories that had been passed down in the family was that Samuel didn't come west with the majority of these Mormon pioneers who had been exiled out of Illinois until several years later and there had always been.
• 18:53
  Crista Cowan: That story had always been shared with a little bit of a hint of criticism like why didn't he come?
• 18:57
  Crista Cowan: Why didn't he move west with the rest of them like he was supposed to do?
• 19:01
  Crista Cowan: Well, now, as we found the rest of the story, we realized that he was actually making sacrifices every time for what he believed was the betterment of his community.
• 19:12
  Crista Cowan: And as I uncovered that story and realized that the fourth time that he earned that team of oxen and the wagon he was able to finally bring his family west, I started to really understand him in a different way.
• 19:27
  Crista Cowan: And then, as I connected the dots from that to the fact that he had always wanted to go to Australia but had given his father enough money to save the family business years earlier 20 something years earlier as I then uncovered additional stories of his later life, as he settled in Utah, helped found communities, helped to take care of destitute families, helped to buy businesses from individuals who weren't as business savvy, whose families were suffering because the business was failing, and that he would help it thrive again.
• 20:07
  Crista Cowan: Like these.
• 20:08
  Crista Cowan: Stories just continued to unfold and I came to recognize in him something of a kindred spirit for myself, because one of the things that I have always felt so passionately about is that I always want to make smart financial and smart career decisions in such a way that if anyone in my life family or not ever needs assistance, that I'm able to step into that.
• 20:38
  Crista Cowan: And what I didn't realize is that maybe I got a little something of that from Samuel, as my mom and I collected these stories and ultimately ended up writing and publishing a biography about his life.
• 20:53
  Crista Cowan: I contacted the cousins and I did it as a kind of self-publishing thing through a company called Blurb.
• 21:00
  Crista Cowan: I don't even know if they're still around, but one of the reasons I chose that route was because I didn't have to order or purchase a lot of inventory of those books and outlay a bunch of cash ahead of time a lot of inventory of those books and outlay a bunch of cash ahead of time.
• 21:14
  Crista Cowan: I could just publish the book online and then it was a print on demand for anyone who wanted to order it, and so I sent out email blasts and messages in the Facebook group and let cousins know that they should purchase this book so that they could learn about him too.
• 21:28
  Crista Cowan: Not only was he this amazing main character, uh, individual in history, he also was this very critical part of our family tree and I wanted people to know about him.
• 21:40
  Crista Cowan: I wanted them to have those stories about him and to see if maybe there wasn't something about him that they could see in themselves and in their own families.
• 21:49
  Crista Cowan: Certainly, one of the things we found was the propensity to red hair.
• 21:53
  Crista Cowan: From everything we've been able to uncover, even though the only photographs we have of him are when he was older and clearly, even though the photo was in black and white, he had white hair Everything we've been able to uncover says he was a redhead and as we collected the cousins, we uncovered this fact that a higher percentage almost double of the members of our family have red hair including two of my brothers than the general population, and we wonder did that also come from Samuel?
• 22:26
  Crista Cowan: So, as we publish this book out to the family to encourage them to come to know him and connect with each other there was this really great response.
• 22:38
  Crista Cowan: In fact, some of my dad's first cousins who still have the name Mulliner wanted to learn more about him and talk more about him, and it became a topic of conversation often when we got together the stories of Samuel In 2012,.
• 22:56
  Crista Cowan: When DNA came on the scene, that exploded the opportunities that we had to uncover more descendants.
• 23:04
  Crista Cowan: Remember, in 2009, I'd had to draw a line in the sand and say we have to stop researching because we have to plan a reunion and we'd had 6,800 descendants With the advent of Ancestry DNA in 2012, over the course of about the next decade.
• 23:21
  Crista Cowan: As my dad and I would work on Sunday nights about every third or fourth Sunday we would work on the Mulliner family connections through DNA, on the Mulliner family connections through DNA, and since then we now have identified more than 10,000 descendants and that number just keeps growing, because the family keeps growing, because new babies are born, as people you know move on and grow up in life, and that's exciting to me to know that there's a whole new generation of people that get to hear these stories about Samuel for the very first time, and so I continue to try to share what I know about him.
• 23:58
  Crista Cowan: I continue to try to make those connections because I think that's important.
• 24:02
  Crista Cowan: I think it's important that we know who our ancestors are, not just as a name on a pedigree chart or some dates and places even, but know as much as we can about them.
• 24:16
  Crista Cowan: I get that that's not possible for every ancestor we have.
• 24:20
  Crista Cowan: Not every ancestor we have has left the kind of legacy, the kind of paper trail, the kind of richness of information that Samuel's life left a trail of for us to find and gather.
• 24:35
  Crista Cowan: But there are clues, there are historical clues, there are places that can connect us to them, and there are certainly far more cousins than I think most of us realize.
• 24:49
  Crista Cowan: So your ancestor may not have had 18 children and 98 grandchildren, they may not have crossed an ocean, they may not have helped found a city, but maybe they left clues about the hard work that they put in or the sacrifice that they made, and I think there are things to learn from that as well.
• 25:10
  Crista Cowan: Here's the epilogue to this story, which is in a couple of years ago I was talking to some of my dad's first cousins I'm really close with them, I love spending time with them and a group of them said that they wanted to go to Scotland and that they wanted me to take them there, scotland, and that they wanted me to take them there.
• 25:34
  Crista Cowan: I had been to Scotland with my mom on that research trip, but my dad had been still working full-time in his career and just hadn't had enough time to take off to make the trip.
• 25:40
  Crista Cowan: He is now retired and was all in on a trip to Scotland.
• 25:45
  Crista Cowan: So in the summer of 2023, myself, my dad, two of my siblings, five of my dad's first cousins and my dad's only living aunt flew to the UK.
• 26:01
  Crista Cowan: We had the opportunity to spend some time in London and then we drove up through a little village called Odlam in Cheshire, which is where Samuel's father had been born, and then we drove up to Glasgow, which is where Samuel had spent time during his mission.
• 26:20
  Crista Cowan: And then we drove over to Edinburgh and spent time there and the whole way I had the opportunity, while driving a 15 passenger van from the wrong side of the car on the wrong side of the road filled with my family, to tell them stories, stories that I had uncovered that were included in the book, stories that I had uncovered that we didn't include in the book, stories that I'd uncovered since I wrote the book, and to just be able to share those stories with them in that place was so meaningful to me, one of the most meaningful moments of that trip, I think, and there were many, but one of them.
• 27:02
  Crista Cowan: As we were leaving Edinburgh, on the day we had spent touring there, my dad pulled up on his phone.
• 27:08
  Crista Cowan: He pulled up the Ancestry app and he opened the tree and he said don't we have the address of where Samuel's parents lived?
• 27:15
  Crista Cowan: When he came back in 1839 and found them and I said, yeah, we do, it's in the tree.
• 27:22
  Crista Cowan: So he pulled it up and he said let's go look for that.
• 27:24
  Crista Cowan: We plugged it into the GPS and it was about three blocks from where we were at the moment and we drove there.
• 27:33
  Crista Cowan: Now the house doesn't still stand.
• 27:34
  Crista Cowan: It's a parking lot in the middle of the city.
• 27:36
  Crista Cowan: But we pulled into that parking lot and we parked the van and again I was overcome with that feeling that I had come home and I realized as I looked around the van sitting in that parking lot in Edinburgh, edinburgh, that it was as much about the people as it was about the place.
• 27:56
  Crista Cowan: The connection that we feel, not just to our ancestors but to our living family, is one of the reasons why I love family history so much and it's one of the reasons why these stories that connect us are so meaningful to me.
• 28:15
  Crista Cowan: So that's the story of Samuel, but it's also the story of me and the story of my dad, and the story of my college roommate, julie, who is and always was but I just didn't know it my fourth cousin.
• 28:28
  Crista Cowan: I hope you've enjoyed this episode of Stories that Live in Us.