Biography

Etta Mae Magee (sometimes Ettie or Addie) was the sixth of eight children born to Ardella Bickham and Samuel Magee. Samuel was the first member of the Magee family to join the LDS Church in 1908 and his wife Ardella followed in 1909. The four oldest children were baptized a few months after Ardella, and then the younger children were baptized when they turned eight. In Etta’s case it was four months following her eighth birthday, on 7 October 1912, when LDS missionary George Ernest Andersen from Thatcher, Idaho, baptized her. Eugene Christensen from Salina, Utah then confirmed her a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on the same day. [1]

Etta Mae grew up with her siblings in what her older sister Freda described as a “happy home” where their parents taught them to read, pray, obey the LDS health code or Word of Wisdom, and to pay tithing. “We always had prayer morning and night and scripture study before going to bed,” Freda stated. “Once in a while missionaries would come by and spend some time teaching us more about the gospel.” [2]

On 14 February 1934, when Etta was twenty-nine years old, she married George Wright Evans at the county courthouse in Tylertown, Mississippi. [3] Together they had five children and moved several times in the 1940s. The family first moved from Tylertown, Mississippi, to Pineland, Texas, and then lived in Albany, Louisiana, where George worked for the Walthall Lumber Company. It was there at age forty that he registered for the World War II draft. Finally the young family moved to Berkeley, California by 1944. [4]

On 14 December 1947, Etta and her mother Ardella joined the Berkeley congregation of the Reogranized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a divergent LDS tradition founded on the claim that Joseph Smith Jr.'s oldest surviving son, Joseph Smith III, was the rightful succesor to his father, not Brigham Young.  Etta passed away on 4 July 1963 and was buried at the Evergreen Cemetery in Oakland, California. [5]

By W. Paul Reeve

Primary Sources

Beaulieu, Freda Lucretia Magee. Address, 1982 January 16. MS 6938. Church History Library, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah.

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Record of Members Collection. CR 375 8, box 4256, folder 1, images 246, 405-406, 451. Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah.

Evans, Etta Mae.  Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Deceased Membership Files, 1877-1995. Film 1986705 and 1993518. Family History Library, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah.

Evans, George and Etta Mae Magee. Marriage License, 14 February 1934. Walthall County, Mississippi.

Evans, George Wright. Registration Card. Serial Number 695, order Number 10,559. WWII Registration Draft Cards, Arkansas and Louisiana. Records of the Selective Service System, 1926–1975, Record Group 147. National Archives and Records Administration, Ft Worth, Texas.

Liahona: The Elders’ Journal, (Independence, MO) Vol. 10, No. 19 (October 29, 1912), 304.

United States Census, 1910, 1920. Pike County and Walthall County, Mississippi.

Secondary Sources

"Evans, Etta Mae," Oakland Tribune (Oakland, California) 05 Jul 1963, 32.

Magee, Etta Mae. Family Tree, Ancestry.com. Accessed 29 April 2018.

Mixon, Gloria Evans. Email, to W. Paul Reeve. 17, 19 April 2018.

Documents

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