Men, Mines, and Molecules

Abstract

My ancestors were drawn together from northern Europe by the new Mormon religion. My mother's people, the Romneys and Cottams, migrated from around Preston, England, arriving in Nauvoo, Illinois in 1839. My grandfather, Henry Eyring, came from Cohurg in Germany, and Grandmother Eyring came from German Switzerland. My Eyring grandparents met while crossing the plains and arrived in Salt Lake City in the same pioneer company in the fall of 1860. My mother's people had reached Salt Lake City 10 years earlier. During the next three decades, colonization of the intermountain area spread from Salt Lake City to Alberta on the North and to Chihuahua and Sonora on the South, wherever the water could be turned out onto the parched land. As a result of these migrations, all my grandparents ended up in the late 1880s in Colonia, Juarez, in northern Mexico, about 100 miles straight south of Columbus, New Mexico.