Volume 3, Issue II
Priceless Treasures in Parowan by Jan Garbett
Just off of Interstate 15 in Southern Utah is the town of Parowan. While never the home of John H. Redd or Elizabeth Hancock artifacts from the family can be found here at the historic Old Rock Church Museum.
Lemuel and Keziah had thirteen children. Their 6th and 11th children were daughters Caroline and Moriah Luella. Moriah was known by her middle name Luella. I will identify her in this article as M. Luella for clarity. The two girls married brothers. Caroline married James Jamison Adams and M. Luella married Thomas Davenport Adams. Caroline’s first child was a girl she named Luella. Along with their immediate families Caroline, M. Luella and Luella lived in Parowan, Utah. Luella was only 15 in 1904 when her mother Caroline died, leaving 8 children. Caroline is buried in the Parowan cemetery (location B-L-G 01-21-02). Luella took over the rearing of her younger siblings. In 1915 she married Harley W. Dalton. They had nine children. Luella was honored in 1956 as Utah Mother of the Year. She and her aunt M. Luella have contributed greatly to preserving our family and the cities rich pioneer heritage in donating priceless family treasures to the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers’ museum in the historic Rock
church at 90 South Main in Parowan City Square. Luella also wrote a book “History of Iron County Mission Parowan, Utah” which is sold at the DUP museum for $15.00.
Parowan DUP Museum Phone: 435-477-3549 Hours: Memorial day thru Labor day, Mon-Sat 1-5 and by appointment.
All the World’s a (Plywood) Stage by Jan Garbett
In the 1950s a closure of mines in Cedar City, Utah resulted in 7,500 families leaving the small town in just 18 months . Enter on the stage Fred Adams son of Paul Monroe Adams who was the 6th of Caroline Redd and James J. Adam’s eight children. (Caroline was the 6th child of Lemuel Hardison Redd & Keziah Jane Butler.) Reared in Delta, Utah, Fred later studied the theatre and after serving a 3 year mission in Finland did graduate work at BYU. In 1959 the USU Branch Agricultural School in Cedar City wanted to start a theatre program and offered the job of running it to Fred Adams. Fred found not only a job in Cedar but his future wife– Barbara Gaddie. It was while they were engaged to be married, trying to save money, they decided to combine their just washed laundry into one load at the Fluffy Bundle Laundromat. “Big mistake,” said Fred. While they waited for the extra large load to dry Barbara and Fred discussed how they could satisfy their love for theatre in the small town. The idea of
the Shakespearean Festival was born. It wasn’t easy garnering support, but in 1961 Fred convinced the Lion’s club to underwrite his venture for $1000 to buy plywood for a stage, costumes and seating. “I’ll be able to get all that back in ticket sales,” Fred told the Lions confidently. He did, clearing $3000 from the first season in 1962-enough to pay back the Lions Club and fund the Festival for the next year. The Festival has continued to run in the black ever since then. From the humble beginnings of the $1000 venture with 21 volunteers the Festivals budget is now 6.5 million with 480 volunteers. The economic impact on Southern Utah totals 64 million annually. In 1977 Fred retired from teaching to run the festival full time and now devotes his energies to fundraising for The Utah Shakespearean Festival Centre for the Performing Arts – another grand idea. With a broad smile Fred quips “I love Cedar, couldn’t have asked for a better place to raise my children. Every time they got into trouble everyone knew
whose they were.”
Matriarch of the William Alexander Redd Grandchildren
Merne Laycock Livingstone, 89, lives in Lethbridge, Alberta. Lemuel H. Redd’s son William Alexander Redd and his wife Verena Bryner left New Harmony in 1905 to make a home in Canada where there was room for all their children to settle down near them. Ironically, half of them returned to the U.S.A. An avid genealogist, Merne has been active in family history callings in ward and stake for many years. She researches family on her husband’s lines in addition to her own and is now helping stir up family members to verify records for the new Family Search program which will be released soon. Merne helped convert sweetheart Don Livingstone and supported him in many callings including London, England mission president. She filled many callings in Primary and Women’s organizations in ward and stake. Don and Merne are parents of four children, 24 grandchildren and 26 great grandchildren. Merne had a hip replacement surgery three years ago and is happy to get out of a wheelchair. She just sent her son Don to D.R.Cong,
Africa as mission president.
We’re on the web at www.reddfamily.org
Redd Family Website by Dave Lyon
If you haven’t seen it, we’d encourage you to visit our family organization’s website, reddfamily.org. In addition to the very basic things you’d expect from a website, we also have a few things you may not expect like an annotated photo from the 1936 Redd Family Reunion and an RSS news feed to keep you aware of site updates and news. We’ve got big plans for the website, including the index to the book, occasional extracts and more community features. Right now, the photos on the site are fairly limited. We encourage you to contribute to the family photo archive by sending high resolution photos (300 dpi) to Dave Lyon at [email protected]. We’ll include them in the archive and we’ll be unveiling that gallery shortly. Photos will be available for viewing but also for downloading at the original high resolution.
If you have an idea for the website or want some news or information included there, please let me know. We want to make the website a valuable website for you.
Musings about Technology, Genes and Genealogy by A Mason Redd
“The Redds are Norman French through the illegitimate son of William the Conqueror, Rufus de Redde,” I often heard my father say. Rufus, apparently, had a red face, thus the surname, de Redde. When his descendants came to Virginia from England they dropped the baggage of nobility and the name became simply, Redd, so the story goes. I liked it. Another story told in my family is that the Redds were school teachers in Scotland, and they took the name from the Little Redd School House. I never did believe this one.
How many of you have a Book of Remembrance. Well I have two that I have started. They contain family group sheets, pedigrees, photos, certificates of blessing, baptism, family histories, etc. These books have pages in them that are 14×8.5 inches in size and one could add page after page until the book became very thick. Needless to say, mine are not very thick. I have, however, seen at least one room, in a neighbor’s home, almost full of these books. What a sight to behold, especially knowing that the contents were either hand written or typed family group sheets. How many of you have a wide carriage typewriter? I have one I purchased in 1967 to use in my practice and to fill out family group sheets. The last time I filled out such a thing on a typewriter was for the four generation family group sheets requested by the Church, except those were 8.5×11 inches in size and fit in a regular three ring binder. Isn’t technology wonderful? I am grateful, however, that I don’t have to write on clay tablets, papyrus,
sheep skin or metal plates that L.H. Redd begat Jay Redd and Jay Redd begat Mason Redd, etc. We’re fortunate to have all that recorded in The Utah Redds and Their Progenitors, thanks to Lura Redd and the development of the Guttenberg Press, one of the most important technological events ever.
I am going to skip over several chapters in technological history including computers, cell phones, Internet, digital this and digital that, places to store enormous amounts of information to get to the point. How do we get through the brick wall-the hidden or missing records that block us from finding out where we came from before Virginia; to make a connection with our roots somewhere on this beautiful earth?
A few weeks ago I heard my son, Alan, say something in a talk that caught my attention. He said that all the cells in our bodies (except red blood cells) contain genetic signatures of our history; nucleated cells contain a DNA record of the past. The time-depth of DNA information ranges from ancient to recent, including: our origins, historical migrations, genealogical relationships, and individual identification. This sounded like information that would complement what I have in my Books of Remembrance and in The Utah Redds and Their Progenitors. Can you imagine that nearly every cell in our bodies contains this kind of information plus the blue print for a living human being? Could genetic information from a single cell have enough information to power through the brick wall and reveal where our Redd ancestors emigrated from? Quite possibly, yes. Alan has determined his own Y Chromosome DNA, which is the same as mine as well as my father, A. Jay Redd and his father, Lemual Hardison Redd and so on. Y
chromosomes are paternally inherited, just as the Redd name. Our Y haplogroup is R1b1c. Individuals in this group populated Western/Northern Europe in great numbers. With 1148 matches (based on 12 Y-chromosome markers) in the Family Tree DNA database, can we narrow our Y ancestry down to France, England, Netherlands, Ireland or Scotland, etc? Not yet, but the evidence is mounting for Scotland. The only exact 12 marker match with the Redd surname was John H. Redd from Virginia (Mollie’s grandson, Redd Alert, Volume II, Issue 1, Spring 2007), thanks to Jan Garbett who gathered genetic samples from him last January. Another 12 marker match, submitted by Jan, was Lloyd Rudd. There were four Reeds or Reids who were also perfect matches. There were no Ridds or Reds. Could it be the Redds, Rudds, Ridds, Reeds and Reids are closely related? If so then Scotland may be our most recent ancestral home before Virginia. Importantly, there is a John Redd from Scotland listed as a settler in Jamestown, Virginia in 1654 in
the Dictionary of Scottish Emigrants in the U.S.A., compiled and Edited by Donald Whyte, F.S.A. Scot., L.H.G. Magna Carta Book Company, Baltimore, MD., USA, 1972.
What is needed, at this point in time, to take advantage of this incredible technology that some have called genetic fingerprinting or genetic typing? I think my son, Alan, would say we need to look at additional markers, up to 25 or even 37. Why? Because the more Y chromosome markers that match among individuals the more closely are they related. It should also be obvious that we need samples from more individuals with the Redd surname and close variants. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to match with someone named Redd who can trace his ancestry way back to Scotland, England or wherever? My dream would be to find a match with a man by the name of Redd whose family has lived for several generations somewhere in Europe. We need that kind of information to power through the brick wall.
New and wonderful technologies come on the scene so frequently that we tend to take them for granted such as taking a photo of the entire earth from space, which has to be one of the most breath taking events in the history of the world. For the first time we could see planet earth for what it is-a giant living, breathing cell with a protective, life sustaining membrane called the atmosphere. The adjacent stylized, color coordinated cell, the repository of so much information was perhaps just as difficult to identify and was the cumulative work of botanists, biologists and medical investigators. Theodor Schwann, for one, published his classic paper on cell theory in 1839 a seminal time in the history of science. The rest is history, as they say.
What new and wondrous technologies will emerge in the next generation? I can’t even guess but I suspect they will be initially as unbelievable as many in the previous generation. In the meantime let’s use the technology we have, to search for “the pit” from which we were “digged,” (Isaiah 51:1). The current evidence-both from written history and paternal DNA-leans toward a Scottish ancestry rather than a French ancestry for the Redd Y. This may change with more evidence. And one last musing, have you noticed by now the linguistic similarity among the words, genitor, gene, genealogy, genus, generation, genome and even general?*
AMR9/16/2007
*Footnote: For additional information about genetic genealogy go to http://www.familytreedna.com on the Internet.
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