Susan Whitaker Kohler

SUSAN WHITAKER KOHLER {[email protected]} is a retired teacher who taught elementary school for twenty years in Illinois and California. For a decade she worked in alumni relations and development at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. She lives in Midway, Utah and Provo, Utah.

Discovering the Woman’s Exponent

Articles/Essays – Volume 49, No. 2

As a sixth-generation Latter-day Saint, I’ve grown up with Church history—it was a frequent topic of conversation whenever our extended family gathered. My second-great-grandfather, George Whitaker, wrote of working as a teamster for Parley P. Pratt when Nauvoo was abandoned in February 1846. Essentially, he’d crossed the ice with a load of Brother Pratt’s wives. The story of George Whitaker is well known. Carol Madsen used his story as an introductory chapter in her book Journey to Zion: Voices from the Mormon Trail.Other family histories whetted my appetite for more information about Church history.