My story begins under the frosty skies of Sweden and Denmark. My father Jens (Jens is James in Sweden) Jacobson was born October 17, 1834 in Brunslov, Ostraly County, State of Malmohn, Sweden. Here he spent his young manhood receiving the education afforded the middle class and serving his apprenticeship as a horticulturist. Here, [he also] heard and embraced the gospel at the hands of Erastus Snow.

He later accepted a call to fill a mission to Denmark, and lived eight years at Copenhagen. During his mission, he converted and baptized a Miss Anne Rasmussen, born February 1, 1837 at Bjargsoc, Holbeck, Denmark. She was the dark-haired, blue-eyed daughter of a hardworking wheelwright. Her father was one of the few men of the district who owned his own home.

Anne had a high school education and served three years as apprentice to a dairyman at Schleswig Und Holstein. The young people were in love but mission rules forbade any love making (dating), so Father waited until he got home and then wrote to his companion, Elder Anton Nelson, asking him to tell Anne of his love and his wish to marry her. She accepted and they planned to marry in the Endowment House in Utah. However, plans were changed and they were married the first day at sea by the captain of their ship, the B.S. Kimball.

They arrived at Fort Laramie on September 5, 1865 and then at Great Salt Lake City in November of that year in Captain Miner G. Atwood’s handcart company.

To leave the old country, [Jens and Anne) borrowed money from Joe Hansen. This they repaid after reaching Utah. Neither Father or Mother spoke English, but Father set about teaching himself to speak English, as well as to read and write it, and succeeded very well. Mother spoke English very brokenly, and until we children began speaking English, Danish was spoken entirely in the home.

"Childhood is the seed from which springs our loveliest blossoms of memory."

I was born January 19, 1872 at Bear River City, Utah, which is not a city at all, but a small farming town ten miles west of Brigham City, and north of Ogden. We moved there from Session’s Settlement in 1869 when Rass, the eldest, was three years old. Session’s Settlement is now Bountiful, Utah, a great orchard community. Father planted the first orchard there.

Our house was situated on a little rise between the Bear and Malad Rivers, close to where the Malad empties into the Bear River. The water in the Malad was brackish and we used it only for household purposes. Drinking water was carried one-quarter mile from Bear River, up a dugway and set in wooden buckets settle. At first we lived in a dugout close to Bear River and Mother had a hard time keeping the little boys away from the river, especially Jimmy, the baby. So Father built a little willow fence around the yard.

Later, on a lot further from the river, Father built one large frame room of weatherboard lined with adobe. A lumber shanty was used as a summer kitchen. Joining this was a slant-roofed cellar where we stored milk, butter, meat, and fruit. A little north of the house we had a grain cellar where my brothers Rass and Jim slept. When the cellar was full of grain they slept in a wagon box.

The furniture was very meager, consisting of a number seven Charter Oak stove, one of the first in town, a homemade table and cupboard of shelves, three or four chairs and a bench. A homemade chest held all of our clothes. This chest Mother later carried into Old Mexico.

Mother once had a green and white checked gingham dress, which she wore for sixteen years. It was then remodeled for Eliza, at which time it didn’t have a break in it. Mother made our little petticoats as neatly as she did our dresses, and trimmed them with lace crocheted from ravelings, or used points made from small squares of cloth doubled into a triangle and stitched to the material on the long edge.

In the winter, wooden clogs were worn by nearly all of the townspeople. Each fall a clog maker came to the house, measured our feet and sent the finished shoes. A pair was expected to last all winter, but sometimes I stole away to skate on the ice and cracked a shoe, which Father had to mend—a hard task indeed. We learned very young to cord and spin yarn for stockings. I did most of the cording, and Eliza did the spinning. Gray yarn was made by mixing white and black wool as we corded. Each girl had the responsibility of knitting and mending stockings for herself and one of the other children.

Though I was so bashful I could hardly meet people, I hired out to a sick lady the summer I was eleven. This was particularly painful for me since the couple was very quarrelsome, and on one occasion while the wife was still bedfast, her husband threw a slab of bacon at her. I became so upset I frequently cried all the way home. This made me appreciate my own loving home all the more.

Being so very religious, Father sometimes held very lengthy family prayer. Rass complained many times that his knees ached and I always tried to get comfortable before we began. One morning just before prayer, however, I found and chewed a leaf of tobacco that Father had dropped while doctoring a sick animal. I thought I would surely die, but we had been taught to make no disturbance during prayer, so I kept silent until prayer was ended. Mother saw I was pale and became alarmed so I had to tell the story. If tobacco makes everyone as sick as I was, I don’t see how there could be any hankering after it.