By your father and grandfather, Joel Bruce Jeppson

My dear children and grandchildren,

There are moments in a person’s life when the past reaches forward and touches the present with a warmth that cannot be mistaken. I want to tell you about one of those moments — a moment that shaped my understanding of who I am, and who you are, and where we come from.

When I was a young boy, your great‑great‑grandmother Mahala Smith Parrish sat in her chair in her home in Ammon, Idaho. My parents and my grandmother, Rubie Parrish Jeppson, had gone to the Idaho Falls Temple together, and I stayed behind with Mahala.

She handed me a small book — her Book of Prose, the writings she had composed across her lifetime. I sat beside her and read her own words back to her. She listened, smiled, corrected me gently, and let her memories rise. And then she began to speak.

She told me stories — not from books, not from hearsay, but from her own life and from the lives of those who had lived before her.

She told me of her father, William Reed Smith, the orphan boy taken in by Fanny Dack Parrish, a young Irish woman who had crossed oceans and borders and grief. She told me of Joel Parrish, Fanny’s son, who stood on the steps of the Nauvoo Temple in the final hours before the Saints fled. She told me of Samuel Parrish, her grandfather, and of old Joel Parrish, her great‑grandfather, whose name would echo down the generations. She told me of Joel Ricks, her other grandfather, endowed in Nauvoo before the exodus. She told me of the Irish humor that ran through our family like a bright thread, and of the covenants that bound them all together through Nauvoo, Winter Quarters, the plains, the mountains, and into Zion.

And I listened.

I did not know then that I was receiving something rare — a story passed directly from the lips of the woman who had lived it, who had heard it from those who had lived it, who had been shaped by the covenants that shaped them all.

But I felt something. A closeness. A warmth. A sense that the past was not far away.

Years later, I would awaken one morning with the sound of a soft Irish chuckle drifting through the veil — a chuckle that felt like Samuel, or Fanny, or old Joel, or young Joel, or Reed, or Joel Ricks — amused and delighted that the riddle they began had finally been understood.

And the riddle was this:

How did all these lives — Irish, Canadian, Nauvoo, covenant‑bound — weave together to become your father and grandfather?

The answer is simple.

It is me. And now, through me, it is you.

You are part of a story that began long before any of us were born. A story of faith, of crossing oceans and rivers, of building temples, of enduring exile, of keeping covenants, of Irish laughter, of family loyalty, and of the quiet strength that carried our ancestors through every trial.

I want you to know this story. I want you to feel it. I want you to carry it. Because it is yours.

And someday, when your own children or grandchildren ask where they come from, you will be able to tell them that their story was carried across generations — from Mahala’s lips to mine, and now from mine to yours.

With all my love, Dad / Grandpa Joel