My great-grandfather, Samuel Bateman, was born in Manchester, England in 1832, converted to the Church, and came to Utah in 1850. He met Marinda Allen, my great-grandmother, in 1853 as he ferried her across the Jordan River and married her the following year. He was 22 and she was 16. In later years he took a second wife, Harriett Egbert (who actually had been a baby when her parents came to Samuel and Marinda’s wedding dinner). Marinda gave birth to thirteen children and Harriet had eight. Marinda’s youngest child, Juliaetta, was my grandmother. She wrote a biography of Marinda, with much about the family and her own life, entitling it Little Gold Pieces. This article is about that book.
