My wives have already given you a fairly thorough introduction to our family.
I’m so blessed to be a husband to my two gorgeous wives and a father to my beautiful daughter. Our family is small for now and we’re looking forward to growing. Tami and I have been married for 8 years, a large portion of which I spent in college. Sophie and I have been married for a year now and thankfully college is a couple of years behind us.
I was born in Arizona, but my “home” has always been in Southern Utah and I was thrilled to be closer to my grandparents and cousins when we moved back when I was 7 years old. My family has been in Southern Utah since the early 1850s. I’ve got deep roots here and it’s a wonderful place to call home.
I enjoy farming. It’s more of a dream for me right now, but we dabble in it and we’re working on expanding.
I also enjoy music. My mother is a piano teacher and insisted that I start learning at a young age. The ability to play the piano has proven to be a blessing in my life many times over. I enjoy playing the organ, and the guitar and banjo as well. I’m not a professional musician, by any means. I don’t practice nearly enough for that. I play my instruments and sing mostly because I enjoy it, though it seems like I have very little time to ever spend making music. In a past life I also enjoyed performing in musicals, though it’s been some years since I was last in a big production.
I was raised as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (formerly known by many as “The Mormon Church”), as many people in Southern Utah are. I spent my childhood attending primary every Sunday. As a teenager, I advanced through the priesthood until I turned 19. That year I was called to serve a mission for the LDS church to the Czech Republic. I fell in love with the language, culture, history, people, and beauty of that amazing country. It truly is a land of fairytales and if you ever have the chance to visit, I would highly recommend it.
Two years later I returned home and launched myself back into college (I was 17 when I graduated from high school and so I was able to complete a year of college before I left for my mission). Within a few months of returning home, I was given an opportunity to serve as an endowment worker for 6 hours every week at the Saint George LDS Temple. I did this for 3 years. Tami joined me for the final year. I was assigned to the same shift as my grandparents and was able to spend a lot of time with them. It was a wonderful opportunity to be with them. I’ve been blessed with a wonderful extended family.
Plural marriage skipped several generations in my family. During the period in time that it was doctrinal in the LDS church, the majority of my ancestors lived in plural marriages. They were prominent families in their communities. Men like William LeFevre and his wives, Hannah Holyoak and Frances Banks. They settled in Southern Utah in the early days and built their lives. They worked hard to provide for themselves. William’s sheep and cattle herds grazed from Garfield county all the way to pastures near LeFevre Ridge in the Kaibab Forest on the south and to the far reaches of Wahweap Creek on the east. Theirs was a life of profound sacrifice and in turn, a life of abundant blessings.
Stories like these were the examples of plural marriage that spurred my initial interest in studying it in more depth. I’m going to give a more detailed account of my journey into plural marriage in another post sometime in the next few weeks. Suffice it to say, it has been a long and sometimes very difficult journey to reach the point that I’m at today. A lot of things can change over a decade and a half, and for me they did. I’ll cover that in next week’s post, if all goes well! Until then, I hope you all have a blessed week.
