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                   MY PERSONAL HISTORY
(Written in 1977)
BY MILLICENT STEWART FERGUSON


I was born 28 June 1908 at 33rd So. 4th East, Salt Lake City, Utah, a daughter of Otto Ren Stewart and Millicent Tollestrup.  My Father's Father was Andrew Jackson Stewart and his Mother  was Mary Emily Weir.  My Mother's Father was Neils Christian Tollestrup and her Mother Lavinia Travis.  My paternal Great Grandparents were Philander Barrett Stewart and Sally Scott and Thomas Weir and Elizabeth Caroline Clark.  My maternal Great Grand Parents were Christian Ericksen and Gertrude Christensen and Christostrom Travis and Mary Howard.

My father`s ancestors (Stewarts) came from Ballymena, Ireland (as did my husband's paternal line, the Fergusons) and England and Scotland.  My mother's father, Christian Tollestrup came from Denmark and my mother's mother, Lavinia Travis came from England.

I never met my Grandfather Tollestrup, Who took his last name from a town in Denmark, although he lived in Gunnison, Utah.  We made lots of trips down there to visit my grandmother and my mother`s sisters, but she never told me about our grandfather, because grandmother had left him when he took another wife in polygamy.  I am very sorry I never got to meet him.  His first wife died by whom he had several children, then he married my grandmother, had seven children by her and several by his third wife.  He was born in Denmark and my grandmother was born in Sheffield England.

I used to love to go to Aunt Pora's (there were also Aunt Mammie and Uncle Walter) she was so comical and kept us laughing all the time.  The stories she would tell about the people and the nicknames they gave them were simply hilarious.  But I always felt bad my mother never took us to see our grandfather.  I would like to have known him.  I remember my mother's mother as being a short, white-haired, little old woman without hardly any teeth.  She lived with her daughter Pora and her family.  She died at 76.

My father's mother, Mary Eliza Weir, lived with us all the early years of his marriage.  She had fallen and broken her hip while walking out to the well to get some water and broke her hip which was never set.  She walked on crutches as long as I knew her, however one time when the house was on fire she managed to get down from the second floor and out of the house without her crutches.  Mother said she was a very wonderful woman.  Grandfather was about 28 years older than she was.  Her mother was Caroline Elizabeth Clark divorced her father Thomas Weir and married Jonathan Browing, inventor of the Browing automatic rifle.  Her mother was a sister to America Clark who was married to Luke S. Johnson, one of the early members of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles.  I barely knew knew grandfather as I was only about 4 years old when he died at 96.


I was an exceptionally beautiful baby (so all my relatives used to tell me).  I was very good natured and quite meek and mild.

We moved to West Temple on 33rd South where I started the first grade at Blaine School which was located at 33rd South and First West, and which was torn down a few years ago (my son Richard bought enough of the bricks to build his home from this school).

I had two boy friends, Herman Proband and Howard Sharp.  My girl friend was Hope Walton.  We had a dog we all liked very much called Touse (call Touse fast several times) and Dad and a mail clerk friend decided to have their dogs fight to see which was the best.  The dogs fought so ferociously and long that they had to pour some ammonia on them to stop them.  They never found out which one was the best fighter.

When I was in the second grade we moved back to Benjamin where we lived until I was in the 8th grade.  We had to go two miles to school.  We walked in warm weather.  Sometimes in the winter we had a large sleigh pulled by two horses.  It had a flat bed and occasionally going around a corner we would slide off.

I was a very happy child and had lots of friends.  I was named after mother and the other kids called me her pet.   My best and life long friend was Mae Berge.  They lived neighbors to us in Benjamin and we were always together.  I was a very good student especially in spelling and multiplication, but once when I was in the fourth grade, we had a spelling bee and I went down on the word "sick", all I could think of was "sik".  I guess I must have practiced a lot after that.

When I was about seven, I was crawling on the floor one evening without shoes on and a needle and thread went into my foot.  By morning my foot had swollen and the thread had turned black.  We had to have the doctor come from Payson.  He had to give me chloroform ( which was the worst stuff I had ever taken) and cut the needle out of my foot.

When I was in the fourth grade, we had a terrible tragedy in the family.  My little three year old sister was burned to death.  I was at school and during recess while we were out playing a girl in the 6th grade ran up to me laughing and told me my sister was dead.  She was the next one to die, her brother ran over her on a motorcycle.

When I was about nine or ten, our parents decided we all needed to have our tonsils out and our neighbor Mrs. Berge was a widow with eight children and hers all needed their tonsils out also.  They decided to hire two doctors to come down from Provo to take them all out in one day.  They were using the south room as the operating room.  After they had finished with several of us, we were lying around on beds and they needed more water.  They called for someone to take it into the kitchen and Bill Berge brought it into the operating room instead.  He saw us all laying around on beds and thought we were all dead.  They were just taking the tonsils out of one of the others at that time.  He ran outdoors and told all the rest of the kids to run for their lives, that several were dead and another was bleeding to death on the table.  All the kids ran and hid.  When they called out for another one to come in, there was no one  to be found.  They had to do much searching, but finally found them all but Bill.  He couldn't be found until the next day.

We had to work very hard on the farm, but we had lots of fun also.  When I was about 16, I was chosen to be "Queen of the May", a celebration we had every May.  I rode on the float. Lulu made me a beautiful orchid dress and I felt very proud.  One time there were 21 kids under 21 years old including our family and the family across the lane.  At night after the work and chores were all done, we would play games such as hide and seek, reliveo, ball, annee-I-over, mumble peg, marbles, jacks, doctor and nurse etc.  The latter ones when we were small.  We had lots of church parties and mother said when they asked what we could bring, I would always raise my hand and say I would bring an eight-quart freezer of ice cream.

The old farm home was a big old rambling home with very large rooms which were very cold in the winter.  The bedrooms were cold and so were the beds.  We would wrap up one of flat irons and take it to bed with us.  We had a chamber under the bed, but sometimes Dad would take me out to the outhouse at night because I was afraid to go alone.  Otto and Hal used to hold the south room and kitchen door on either side of the entrance hall when I was in to to scare me, because they knew I was afraid.  Summer on the farm, however, was beautiful and cool and we had wonderful cold water.  We worked very hard thinning beets, weeding corn, hauling hay, shocking wheat, topping beets and many other chores.

When I was about 13, I contracted to thin an acre of beets for a neighbor.  I got up at 5:00 O'clock and thinned beets till breakfast and then thinned all day for my dad.  I wanted to earn some extra money for the Fourth of July.  In those days the Fourth was a really big deal and we looked forward to it for weeks.  So I earned six dollars and spent it all on my friend Mae Berge and myself.  We had a great time even though some wicked fortune tellers tried to gyp us out of it.  They got most of our money so we stood out in front of their place and told they people they were gyps until they came out and ran us off.  They were gypsies.

When I was in the 8th grade Dad decided to move us to Provo.  I remember we loaded some furniture on big wagon and tied a cow on th back.  I can recall walking most of the way beating the cow to make her go.  We moved into a house on 231 West 4th North.  I was very bashful and had a hard time getting by in school for a while and didn't like it.  The eight grade was in with the high school.  I had been at the top of my class in Benjamin.

We moved back to Benjamin for the summer.  The next year we moved back to Provo, 906 West Center where I had lots of friends; Ardell and Evelyn Gren (twins), Veda Hansen, Elva Peterson, and Verlie Vincent.  We had many good times together.  We used to play 500, and we would get quite violent with one another and do a lot of quarreling, but we meant nothing by it.

We moved back and forth for the next four years, except for one at which time I went to Spanish Fork High School and wasted the whole year, later having to repeat that year of school.  We lived several different homes in Provo: 1070 West Center, 257 West 1st South and in a big old home that was an old Stewart home at 285 South 5th West.
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