Annals of our ancestors; one hundred and fifty years of history in the ...

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ANNALS OF OUR ANCESTORS
under a Baptist Mission Board. She was of a courageous and
independent character, ready for emergencies. When our
father married her, she was a widow with one child, a daughter.
After their marriage, father returned to Minnesota and settled
down again at Pearl Lake Place. Here he spent some years
amid the quiet scenes of rural Hfe. Father passed much time
in his study and with the pen. He wrote for the Original
Essay columns of a church paper, The Christian Standard, for
years, while his wife looked after the household and practiced
medicine as opportunity offered. With hired help they carried
on the farm until the decline of life suggested their removal to
a less rigorous climate, and so they removed to Cameron,
Missouri, and made their home there. A family of cousins
upon the Watkins and another on the Utter side hved there,
and when father received a call to minister to the church there
it seemed wise to do so. In this way Cameron came to be the
scene of our dear father's last earthly days.
Cousin Araminta Utter (Mrs. C. E. Packard) lived on a
farm near Cameron, and her appreciative presence meant
much to our father. Her father, William Utter, was much
more like a brother than a nephew to him. Within easy
driving distance of the town Hved our cousin, Sam Watkins,
a good man and true, not unlike his father. It was while
father lived in Cameron that Uncle Joseph died in Morrow,
Ohio, and I will here insert the obituary notice our father wrote
concerning his brother. It recalls the past of which I have
written in the first chapter of our annals.
My only brother is dead. He died at his residence near Morrow,
Warren County, Ohio, on May 2, 1882. He had passed his seventyseventh
year. He embraced Christianity when he was about twentyeight,
but his tender conscientiousness dates from the time he knew
good from evil.
He was nearly seven years my senior, and as we were always
together in our boyhood, his quick-sighted sense of propriety saved
me from many an error. My mother was very watchful lest I should
make some terrible blunder in boyhood, but she could not always be
present with me; however, the ever watchful elder brother was to me
a duplicate of mother's carefulness.
When nine years old Joseph lost his sight by cataract, but after