Comfort DAVIS - 1801 Newent and Mormon trek (General)

by rookancestrybest , United Kingdom, Friday, October 21, 2011, 21:58 (4785 days ago) @ mikedavies

I think those who went out to the USA after about 1847 had their sea passage paid for by the Mormon church but those who went out prior to that paid their own way across the Atlantic. If you put the words "Mormon Pioneers" into a search engine you will find a wealth of information about particular individuals and, no doubt, your family members. Likewise if you know where they settled there will be gravestones etc to see on the Internet. You probably already know but in case you don't if you look on Familysearch.com it will be likely that you will find a great deal of information about the ancestors and antecedents of your relatives who were Mormons which will be helpful to you, you might also find that descendants of your ancestor who are still Mormans may have done extensive family history research and downloaded family trees, stories, photographs etc onto the Internet which you will find through a simple search. I, like you, was very surprised to find Mormon links in my family (not so much on the FOD side as on another side of my family who I had presumed were staunch C of E!) as I had no idea about it beforehand, however this led me to find that hundreds of people made the journey to Utah, some of whom took years to work their way there (particularly if they funded themselves).Up until then I had assumed that most Mormans had been people already in America but I was wrong to assume this. I also found that people from Germany and Denmark converted to it in huge numbers too. You might find some of the family stayed in St. Louis for a while as this was where people tended to wait before joining a wagon train once they had crossed the Atlantic and travelled from New Orleans.
There is an article which I have been trying to get hold of which Charles Dickens wrote as the Victorian Government began to be concerned about the numbers leaving and why and they commissioned him to find out.If anyone knows where it can be obtained I'd appreciate it.