Aunt Mildred looked pretty much as I remembered her and, unfortunately, there aren’t very many memories. According to my genealogy, she was the ninth of thirteen children. Of the ten children who survived childhood, she’s the only one who never married. My only memories of her are from my early childhood shortly after the farmhouse burned down in Cleveland and we were living in the small house on Uncle Rulon and Aunt Ann’s property. At the bottom of the hill stands another very small house. I think it’s empty today, but it’s hard to tell. Aunt Mildred lived in that small house with her mother, my great grandmother Burton. I remember visiting with them a couple of times and that’s pretty much all I remember.
From the talks at the funeral, however, I learned that she was an interesting woman. She loved sports of all types and particularly BYU football. She would get very involved in the games that she attended and was very partisan. She also never drove a car. She lived with her mother until her mother died in 1964. Then she lived with some other brothers over the next 32 years in northern Utah. She spent her last eleven years living with her kid brother (six years younger than her), my uncle Willis Burton and his wife Virginia in Salt Lake City. She died from breast cancer at the age of 93. She served a mission sometime after her father (my great grandfather) died in 1944. She was always very active in the Church and as part of the eulogy, her niece read Aunt Mildred’s testimony from her journal. The funeral was very nice (the mortuary was very warm). The day was sunny and lovely. I think that the temperatures were in the mid 70’s at the Cleveland Cemetery with no wind.
The Cleveland Cemetery is a very nice rural cemetery sitting on a hillside overlooking the Bear River and Mound Valley below (named for some Indian burial grounds along the river). Mom and dad’s headstone is in place … needing only to have their death dates carved into the stone. A short distance away, Uncle Nate and Aunt Sharon have put their headstone in place where they’ll be buried whenever they pass away. My cousin Dean Burton and his wife Lois have their headstone in place awaiting their departure. One of the young ladies (early twenties, I’d guess) remarked to me how weird it was that undead people already had their headstones in place. I told her that it wasn’t very weird at all … the Cleveland Cemetery was a very popular cemetery and plots are going fast because people are just dying to get in there. It took about 10 seconds for this very old joke to take hold and she let loose with a very long groan. Score!
I thought as how the Burton / Smith family is a pretty prolific and a quite long-lived family. Generations have crossed a couple of times. For instance, great-grandmother Burton’s oldest daughter Ethel Burton was pregnant with her first child at the same time as great-grandmother Burton was pregnant with her penultimate child. Ethel’s second child was almost two years old when great-grandmother became pregnant with her last child.
Great-grandmother’s second child, my grandmother Mary Burton Smith, was pregnant with her first child (my father) at the same time her sister Ethel was pregnant with Ethel’s second child, which occurred before great-grandmother became pregnant for the last time.
My mother was pregnant with me, her first child, at the same time my grandmother Smith was pregnant with her last child, my uncle Delon.
So, I’ve got an uncle younger than me. My dad had an aunt younger than him. A truly Mormon family where mother and daughter-in-law are pregnant at the same time. So far, however, that hasn’t proliferated any further.
And how about being long lived?
- Great Grandfather George Burton lived 69 years, dying in 1944
- Great Grandmother Mary Ransom Burton lived 84 years, dying in 1964
- Daughter Ethel lived 91 years, dying in 1991
- Son George lived 78 years, dying in 1980
- Daughter Mary (my grandmother) lived 59 years, dying of stomach cancer in 1963 (almost a year before her mother died)
- Son James lived 63 years, dying in 1969
- Son William only lived 3 years, dying in 1910
- Daughter Vera lived 84 years, dying in 1994
- Daughter Orella lived 11 years, dying in 1922
- Son Rulon … I don’t know when he died! It wasn’t all that long ago, however. He lost a leg in an automobile accident when I was about seven years old. I worked for him on his farm one summer and was amazed at how much he could do with a wooden leg.
- Daughter Mildred lived 93 years, dying this past week
- Daughter Elvina … she was at the funeral and is about 91
- Son Willis … also at the funeral and is about 89
- Daughter Delma lived less than a month
So, those be pretty good genes. I didn’t know very many people at the funeral. I sat next to a cousin Marianne Smith, daughter of my uncle Ross Smith. I haven’t seen or talked to her since Grandfather Smith’s funeral, although we’ve exchanged a couple of emails about a possible Smith Family Reunion. There were a few others that I kind of knew, but as Nina remarked, it was almost like picking some funeral at random and walking in off the street! Sometime a few pictures will make it to the picture album.
