John Alma Gardner and Ella Eldora Pike

Funny story...I was in FamilySearch last night, looking at one of my ancestors, when I noticed that a couple of his wives weren't attached to him. So I went and attached the wives, feeling all proud of myself, and then I realized...I'd attached them to the wrong guy. *Sigh*...so I unattached them and felt silly. So, learn from my mistake: don't try to do family history when you should be sleeping instead.

Anyway, onto John Alma Gardner and Ella Eldora Pike.

Ella Eldora Pike

I had a hard time getting records for John and Ella. Part of that is probably because there just aren't a lot of records available online right now from the Uintah Reservation. So if anyone has other records or information on these two, I'd love to hear about it and post them here!

John Alma Gardner was born December 20, 1880. He is the son of Martha Timothy Gardner Rudy and Charles Alma Gardner; he is also the grandson of Charles Gardner. The first record I have for John is the 1900 census, where he appears in Uintah County, Utah, in the home of his step-father, Josiah Rudy, and his mother, Martha Rudy. He married Ella Eldora Pike on April 12, 1904, according to this transcription from the Western States Marriage Index.

Ella Eldora Pike was born July 21, 1884. She is the daughter of Lydia Jane Taylor Pike Jones Workman (Lydia was married three times) and Lucius Aaron Pike; she is also the granddaughter of Henry Taylor and Annie Copperfield. The first record that I have for Ella is this 1900 census, where she appears at the Haskell Institute in Kansas. (This copy of the census is very hard to read; she appears on the 17th line down.) The Haskell Institute was a non-reservation Indian boarding school that had students from several western states; Ella's uncle, John, died there in 1901.

The next record I have is this 1908 Indian Roll census from 1908. The Indian Rolls seem to have been taken every year, so if you have access to Ancestry.com (it can be accessed for free from some public libraries and any LDS Family History Library), you can search through and find this family in any year you want. It wasn't until the later years, however, that white members of a household were included on the Indian Rolls, so John Alma Gardner doesn't appear here.

Ella Eldora Pike died on June 8, 1909 (according to this transcription from the Utah Death Registers), from complications of the birth of her youngest son. After that, John was called to the Eastern States Mission for a time, but I haven't found him in the 1910 census yet.

I don't have a personal history for John Alma Gardner, so I can only piece together his life after that from the documents I've found. John married Alice Jane Payne Long in 1912, and they had twin sons in 1913. You can see their family in these censuses from 1920, 1930, and 1940.

Alice died in 1954, and John married a woman named Myrtle Parker sometime after that. John Alma Gardner died March 8, 1969. You can see his obituary and gravestone here. Alice and Ella are buried with John in the Vernal Memorial Park Cemetery, and Myrtle is buried next to them.