JOHN McCORD LAMOREAUX FAMILY CONVERSION
as told by Edith Ivans Lamoreaux
Two boys, David and Andrew Lamoreaux, sat on the rickety seat of an old delivery rig, discussing earnestly a new venture that had just come into their lives. David, the driver, slapped the lines vigorously on the back of old Toby, for promptness in delivery and honesty was insisted on by the father of these two boys.
The discussion on the subject of religion was very exciting to these boys. AI’m sure,said Andrew, the older, AIf we accept baptism with the rest of the family as father urges, we be made fun of by all of our friends, but I don’t care. I knew it was the true Gospel of Jesus Christ as I listened to those Elders preaching it. And I’m willing to risk everything in life for it. David acquiesced assuringly.
David was a quiet, retiring lad, always backward in self-expression. He looked upon this older brother, more forceful, and already an eloquent leader and speaker, with real hero worship. Nothing would suit Andrew better than to shout from the house-tops that God had spoken again from Heaven, revealing to the boy-prophet, Joseph Smith, who, at the time lived in nearby New York, the same ideas of repentance and baptism by immersion as recorded in the four Gospels of the New Testament, with all the powers and privileges promised.
John McCord Lamoreaux, father of these boys, living in Scarborough, Upper Canada, near Toronto, had been a successful business-man in his community for some twenty years. His father, Joshua, before him, had started the grocery business from a mere scratch financially. It was now 1832 and things were going well, financially, for the Lamoreaux family, but when it came to things of a spiritual nature, they didn’t feel complete, something was missing.
John, feeling something special about these two Americans, had opened the attic of his big store as an assembly room and allowed Elders John Taylor and Parley P. Pratt, to preach the Restored Gospel of Jesus Christ, as they called it. The room was filled with listeners. The Lamoreaux family had been looking for something, and this was it! The entire family was baptized.
As soon as John McCord could sell out his business, he, with his family, moved to Ohio, to be near the Prophet Joseph, whose chief branch of the Church was then at Kirtland. Not all the Lamoreaux family remained faithful. Some, already married, drifted into nearby states, where their descendants still reside. However, these two sons, Andrew and David, were forever loyal to the Restored Church of Jesus Christ and to its Prophet.
Their beloved mother, Abigail Ann, died in 1839 when they were living in Springfield, Missouri. Along with their families, the Lamoreauxs were persecuted by the mobsters and moved with the main body of the Saints to Nauvoo. Here they had some exiting experiences, including retrieving the Nauvoo Temple bell from the Methodist minister who had stolen it, to take to the Rocky Mountains with them. When the time came they crossed the Mississippi, the bell hidden in the wagon under their belongings, and walked to Council Bluffs, Iowa, where their father and patriarch, John McCord, passed from this life, a faithful Latter-day Saint, on October 2, 1848 at the age of 83.