TAAMBOURA, BLISS AND THE MORMONS

[Stanley]

Worrying about age doesn’t cure it so I don’t do it. I just get on with the job of living a useful life.

That is probably the best and most concise dual history essay I have seen for a while. (And it had two conclusions...) Thanks, I have filed at away. O, we can state with some certainty that the eruption of Tambora was one of the best things that ever happened as far as genealogy is concerned. Wonderful!

Thanks for advancing my education yet again. There was a very persuasive programme on TV last night about Michael Ward’s book ‘The Narnia Code’. They also mentioned Lewis’ book ‘The discarded Image’. I am intrigued and must read both of them. I’ll bet you alraeady know about them?
Love, S.

Bliss, Robert wrote:
Don’t worry about your age. It happens to everyone, more or less.

That eruption caused severe economic hardship in rural New England, suffering anyway because of overcrowding and farmed out, thin soils. The Smith family suffered very badly in the “Summer of 18 and froze to death”, as 1816 was known. So, by the way, did the Bliss family, but it was further up the socio-economic tree and had a competent patriarch, my great-great-great grandfather, who moved his large family from Bliss Pond, Vermont, across New York State, then Pennsylvania, then Ohio, before finally settling in Libertyville, Iowa. But he was always able to sell when he moved, and he thus settled an adult child at each stop, on a freehold family farm, but by the time he crossed the Mississippi he was all wore out (speaking of age), and it was all he could do, I gather, to get himself buried by his oldest son, who had made every move with him, and then made one more without him, to Diagonal, Iowa, where my grandfather Ralph was born in 1881. It’s interesting that John, born in about 1805, named all his children with classical names (my great-grandfather was Horace Bliss, one of his sisters Leonora, etc.), after two centuries of biblical ones. Still, the family stuck with the Congregational Church and never joined any rabble-rouser sect. Solid, respectable whigs, they were.

The Smiths, on the other hand, were foreclosed after the eruption, left Vermont, and straggled on to some poor land in New York, near Elmira, where Joseph—one of several children who moved along with the tribe—suffered a good deal and began to have doubts about all the religious revivals going on about him in the depressed, cold farming region. Not doubts about reliion mind you, for he was beginning to have visions himself, but about the multiplicity of religious voices he heard. So it was in the 1820s that Joe found the gold tablets in a field outside of Elmira, New York. . And not only that, but also found the seer stones, ummim and thummim, that allowed him to translate said tablets.

I say nothing about their genuineness, of course, but I do venture to say that they might not have been found had it not been for the eruption at Tambora.

Cheers.

Bob