33 Months as a POW in Stalag Luft III: A World War II Airman Tells His Story Book

Someone wrote a book about my great-great[-great?] granny.

Growing up, I learned her story as a Mormon faith-promoting tale. How she gave up her comfortable life in London and came across the ocean and plains to Utah. How she lost a child on the way, but kept the grand piano, which was the first one in the Salt Lake valley. And about that journal she kept -- truly stunning writing, where she celebrates the beauty of any landscape she's in. She stayed on the deck of the ship even during the storm because she couldn't bear to miss the lightning.

I knew about this. I saw her piano in the Church History Museum. But Denton adds big swaths I didn't know.

Like how the missionaries never told Jean Rio about that whole polygamy thing. She rolled into this valley as a rich widow, with no interest in becoming anyone's wife. The church took her wealth, and left her as dirt-poor farmer in an Ogden dugout. Brigham Young took her piano and gave it to his 27th wife. (One tiny moment of justice: the young wife later divorced Young and started a speaking tour on the damage done by polygamy).

I didn't know that rumors of the Mountain Meadows Massacre made Jean Rio decide she finally had to get out. I didn't know about her fear that the Danites would punish her if they caught her trying to leave. I didn't know her sons fled in the middle of the night by horseback but she had to wait years until the transcontinental railroad was finished and the hyperviolent Mormon 'reformation' had settled down before she could make it to California.

I didn't know that in California she became a midwife and joined a Congregationalist church that was notoriously progressive (the first church in the area to racially integrate, active in women's rights struggles).

And living in this valley that she fled and reading the things I didn't know, I had a strange, unprecedented sensation: connection to an ancestor.

I'm grateful to Denton for this book. I also have a few critiques:
-Biographies are boring. I wanted more memoir - I wanted to hear how the author felt about the story she uncovered.
-I worry about accuracy. Denton got some stuff wrong about the Book of Mormon that she would have known if she read it carefully. I worried what else was inaccurate. If you're being critical of a religion adhered to by millions, you should probably get some good fact-checkers.
-It feels bad to read about one lady's problems within an unacknowledged context of the genocide of the indigenous people in this area. I think it's an important grounding for any story of colonizers and pioneers.