From Marcus Smith

So I've looked at the ancestry of Howard Thomas Pitts, and have eliminated that lineage as a possibility. But I can't figure out where the ancestry of Elaine Smith is from. Do we tie in on your Smith side at all? I'm a pretty good sleuth and was able to see some amazing photos of your family online, on the Petty side. Is Elaine from the Absalom Wamsley Smith clan of Draper, or perhaps she connects to some of my Sanpete county relatives ... Whitings, Washburns, etc.


We are related, after all! But it's way back for many, many generations. In your pedigree there is a Searle family. We connect, it appears, at a John Searle who married a woman whose maiden name was Channon. But the ancestral file contains some spurious dates. Otherwise I'd feel more confident about mapping out the connection. In more recent times, my great-grandfather John Kienke was involved in an event during the Utah War of 1857 that involved, apparently, eight Mormon men: John Smiley Lott (your ancestor), John Murdock, Porter Rockwell, Sylvanus Collett, John Kienke (my ancestor), Samuel Pitchforth, Homer Brown, and (I think, if I remember, Absalom Woolf. This event came to be known as the "Aiken Massacre," or "Aiken Murders." I've been working on this story for a long, long time, as part of my family history. I knew Shawn and Todd best in the BYU ward. Eric was there for a while too. There was a night when a bunch of us from BYU dropped in on your home, on the way either coming or going to the Grand Canyon for a hike. Could have been Zions or Bryce. We did a lot of hiking back then.


I'm working on a biography of John Kienke. That's a project now going on 15 years!!!! And with four children at home ages 7, 5, 3, and 1, you can imagine that it's almost impossible these days to devote any long stretches of time to research. That would be abandoning my poor wife! Anyway, what I think you should do to follow the story ... at least to get a toe-hold on th events, is to read Harold Schindler's chapter on it in his biography of Orrin Porter Rockwell. Since he wrote that chapter, there have been some new developments that correct or amplify some of his interpretations. But the basic gist of the story is there and is, I think, basically correct. I think it lacks some important war context, however. I think that on the myancestry chart there is a giant leap in some missing generations on the Pitts line, jumping from a birth around 1800 back to the 1600s. The problem on the Searle line is that the dates in familysearch show generations too close together, with John Searle who married the Channon having a soon born to him when he is only about 10 years old. So something is going on there that is a problem too. I don't have them at my fingertips, but those were the things that lept out at me at a glance. Wow .... working in the Manti Temple must be wonderful. Are some of the sessions there still live?