Kindex

Grandmother was not only a small woman but as a girl she had been frail, but she had what it took to live out ninety-six years. She lost her mother by death when she was eleven years old and sometime within the next year while she was still less than fourteen, she and her brother (four years older) joined the Mormon faith and moved from Chester, Pennsylvania, to join the Saints. Their father was sad that his children should take his course but he was known as a kindly and loving man and as a result told his daughter, Margaret, to come back home when she found out her mistake. She was married when she was twenty-five years old and arrived with her husband and his first wife in Salt Lake in September of that same year. For the next fourteen years she lived in a number of places including Salt lake City, Provo for a few months, Over Jordan, Bountiful, and West Weber and in 1862 her husband bought a home and a farm in Centerville where she lived for fifty-five years, spending her last two years in Georgetown with mother.

What I will record in the next few sentences came, I am quite sure, from my mother's sister Emily, and the same phrases I will, or could use, to describe my mother.

"From 1871 to 1901 Margaret was President of the Relief Society. Sisters from Salt Lake City, Eliza Snow, Zina D. Young, Precinda Kimball, Emeline B. Wells and many others often visited her home. If anyone in the community was sick, 'Sister Randall' was called in, and was always there either day or night, often staying days at a time with persons sick with any kind of disease. It was said of her that she was truly a ministering angel. Besides caring for the sick and preparing the dead for burial, she was often sending food and needed articles to those in need--but never mentioning it; she would quietly slip it out of the house. If her daughters happened to see her taking it she would say, 'If we give it, then maybe we won't need it.' She truly followed the admonition 'Do not let your left hand know what your right hand doeth.' She also went to Salt lake and studied obstetrics and practiced in that capacity for a number of years, officiating at sixty births.

The above paragraphs have been partly about mother, but mostly about her parents and I have entered these bits from their history because I think it will help the reader, as it does me, to understand mother better.

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