This is the personal web site of JayIrvinH sirnames: Hadley, Shaw, Vanderhoof, Rasmussen.

www.Jayih.com is full of rich content,
information and historic photographs of Utah and the people of early Ogden, Weber County, Brigham city, Box Elder County including mormon pioneers along with there sons and daughters.

JayIrvinH is related to Bill Hickman through Bill's 3rd wife Manerva (Wade) Hickman his gg-great grandmother and Lerona M. (Hickman) Vanderhoof his g-great grandmother.

old glass bottles web pages
My Old glass bottle collection.

In 2004 I developed a web site for
The Haven Farm

This last winter I developed a site for The Oregon Trappers Association

Daughter of a Utah Pioneer Grace Shaw at a July 4th celebration with her children and other children (circa 1912)

Recently through my family history research I was able to find out about a book titled "Valborg." Valborg is an autobiography authored by her son Lorin F. Wheelwright. I found a copy on line and it has been an exciting read.

Valborg Rasmussen's Autobiography tells how she was converted to the Mormon church by a missionary named, Willard Snow Hansen, and then migrated from Copenhagen, Denmark on a ship to New York, City and then by train to Brigham City, Box Elder, Utah at the age of thirteen. Willard Snow Hansen, the missionary who converted Valborg Rasmussen to Mormonism. later arrived in Brigham city an the feds arrested him for polygamy. He had 2 beautyfull families in 1888 he loved very much. I can tell by there sweet picture in the book. The judge sentenced him to the state pen. Valborg latter paid $70.00, allot of money in them days, for her sister, my grandma, Dagmar Rasmussen to come to Utah. Valborg was also influential in getting grandma to seek medical help for my father when he was 2 years old and very ill with the cholera.
Click on her image for more pictures of the Rasmussen's.

Danish Immigration: Denmark supplied more immigration to Utah in the nineteeth century than any other country except Great Britian. Most of these Danes--nearly 17,000---were converts to the LDS Church, heeding an urgent millennialistic call to gather to "Zion." ...

Bill Hickman and Porter Rockwell were both body guards for the Mormon profits Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. Most documentairs and histories of the time mention Porter Rockwell, and for what ever reason, leave out gg-great grandpa William Adams Hickman. Bill Hickman's daughter Minerva was my grandma Betsy Grace(Vanderhoof)Shaw's mother.
Visit my my ancestry page for more information.

Bill Hickman, born 1815 died and was buried in the Wyoming wilderness near Lander in August 1883.

"My mother always seemed ashamed of her ties to Hickman and never mentioned him by his full name while I was growing up in California. Finally at age twenty-one, after reading official Mormon church historian Joseph Fielding Smith's Essentials of Church History, I asked the crucial question: Was the "self confessed murderer" mentioned in this book my ancestor? My mother, not one to accept criticism even of a dead ancestor she seemed ashamed of, defensively justified Hickman by saying, "He killed a Mexican who stole his wife. Brigham Young told him to do it, and he was excommunicated from the church." (Actually, as I later learned, Hickman's excommunication occurred more than two years before the shooting of Frank Moreno, but family traditions die hard.)"

"Wild Bill" Hickman's grave in the mountains west of Lander, Wyoming, was kept a secret from all but his first wife, Bernetta, and three of his grown children and their spouses. Other Hickman descendants were never told. Evidently, the end of their progenitor's life did not match his promising beginnings. Hickman's life has never been recounted before except by Bill Hickman himself, and even then the story was incomplete. (Hope A. Hilton 1988) excerpt form "Wild Bill" Hickman and the Mormon frontier.

Preface from H. Hiltons book: A "Mormon mountain man" is in many ways a contradiction in terms. Free-spirited explorers like Jim Bridger, William. Ashley, Jedediah Smith, and others were often unchurched, single, buckskin-clad pioneers. Although William Adams Hickman was a trusted member of the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon), husband to ten plural wives, including an Indian squaw, father to thirty-five children, and one of Utah territory's earliest lawmen, he was also an independent, rough, undisciplined mountain man and outlaw. As much at home in his trading post near Fort Bridger as in his more comfortable house in the Salt Lake Valley, and responsible for more deaths than lives saved, Hickman led an enigmatic eventful life.

There was never a time during Bill Hickman's western experience that stories often exaggerated of his usually "notorious" exploits were not related in homes throughout the Salt Lake valley and elsewhere. His sixty-eight years took him from Mormonism's beginnings to its periods of isolation and adjustment during the 1850s and 1870s. He died in 1883 a non-Mormon because of an excommunication he considered unwarranted. Hickman's loyalty to the Mormon church and its leaders continued until 1863, thirteen years after his arrival in the Great Salt Lake Valley, when he accepted employment with the United States government. Earlier, he had served his church as one of the most valuable, effective Mormon guerrillas harassing federal troops during the 1856-58 Utah War. But after he took a position as a federal Indian guide, Mormon church leaders viewed him as a renegade church "spy," no longer worthy of their support and friendship.      Read more --> about Wild Bill Hickman