Thomas and Catherine Foy (1836)

(There are some discrepancy in the records of the Foy family.  The ordinance record shows that they were baptized in 1842, but as I read through their family records, they were actually baptized in 1836. It may be that they were baptized in 1836, but then rebaptized in 1842, which was a common practice in the early church.) 

Thomas Birk Foy and Catherine Rebecca Fink Foy 1936

Thomas Birk Foy was born in 1802 in Pennsylvania, but his father was from France. There are a lot of family legends about Thomas Foy and his family, but not a lot of historical evidence to back it up. One family story is that one of Thomas’ ancestors was a general to Napoleon, and another was married to King Charles of Spain. Family legend suggests that Thomas’ father came to America as an indentured servant, and that he drove a supply wagon in the Revolutionary War. Other accounts say that he was a cooper, and made barrels for a living. One story says Thomas was the last of 12 children born to his parents.

Thomas seems to have had no formal education. His father died when he was 17, but older brothers and sisters looked out for him. In 1820 or 1821 he moved with his brother to Indiana County, PA, which was considered frontier at that time. There Thomas met Catherine Fink, the daughter of German immigrants, and they were married in 1828.  They lived next door to Catherine’s parents and Thomas worked as a wheelwright. 

After the dedication of the Kirtland Temple, the new Mormon church sent out missionaries throughout the United States.  Erastus Snow went to Pennsylvania and there met and baptized the Foys. The church grew in Pennsylvania, and the Foys stayed there until 1840 when they moved to Warsaw Illinois, near Nauvoo. Catherine, by that time, was expecting her 5th child. The census of 1842 required that people list their taxable goods.  From that census we know that the Foy Family were living in poverty.  Warsaw was a portage town, where people would unload their boats, haul everything upstream to avoid rapids, and then re-enter the river. It was a place where opponents of the church would have arrived to harass the people of Nauvoo.  The Foy’s must have been victims of some of the harassment because when the church asked members to record their grievances against the mobs, Thomas and Catherine had losses to report. 

In 1841 Thomas was ordained an elder by Willard Richards, and Catherine obtained her patriarchal blessing from Hyrum Smith. Thomas received his patriarchal blessing in 1842, and it states that he would “have an inheritance with the remnants of the seed of Jacob, not of Joseph, but of Issachar.”  

In 1845 mob violence had increased so the Foys, who now had 7 children, moved to Nauvoo for safety. The records show the exact plot they bought and it put them in the same ward as Joseph Smith, Wilford Woodruff, Brigham Young and other well known persons in church history. Maybe for this reason, Thomas and Catherine were part of the first endowment session in the Nauvoo Temple  in January 1846. 

There is no record of when they left Nauvoo due to persecution, but by 1848, when their eighth child was born, they were in Council Bluffs. Then later that year they were sealed by Heber C. Kimball in Winter Quarters. 

Because Thomas Foy was a wheelwright, he was asked to stay in Iowa to help build wagons for those crossing the plains. Though there are no records when they crossed, it was probably in 1850 when the church called all remaining saints in Iowa to migrate to Salt Lake. There is one letter that states that Catherine got Cholera on the trip west, and was also 4 months pregnant, but she survived. (Catherine went on to have 12 children total) They do show up in the 1850 census as living in Salt Lake City. They later moved to Ogden, where Thomas married a second wife, Louisa Potterill (who was only 20, 11 years younger than Thomas’s oldest daughter. Louisa ended up having 8 children with Thomas). They were eventually called as part of the “Cotton Mission” to try to grow cotton in Saint George, where they stayed until Thomas’ death in 1873. Catherine died in 1870, but Louisa lived until 1920.