52W Mark IV – Week 27: Card B1 Milton Leo Burgess and Hazel Nelson

We’re halfway through the 2025 edition of my take on Amy Johnson Crow’s 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks Challenge. With it I start the maternal side of my family and a new suit involving my mother’s paternal line. It’s also my Mormon lineage. In fact, my  Gx4 Grandfather, William Burgess (1794-1880), joined the church in 1832, two years after it had been founded. Moreover, all eight of my maternal grandfather’s great grandparents joined the church in the 1830s and 1840s.

However, after five generations, that came to an end with my grandfather, Leo Burgess, as none of his four children were members of the church or raised Mormon. In fact, my grandfather was pretty much a lapsed Mormon, if there is such a term, by his late teens. He only returned to the church after my grandmother, Helen Lerner, passed away.

Leo’s parents, and the subject of the first card of this suit, were Milton Leo Burgess and Hazel Nelson.

Milton was born in Vernal, Utah, on September 9, 1891, the eighth of nine children born to Horace Conrad Liggett Burgess and Sarah Florilla Cook. Florilla passed away in January 1894, a few weeks after her last child, also named Sarah Florilla (“Rilla”), was born. Milton was only two years old at the time. Horace remarried shortly afterwards, to Julia Josephine Lundquist, with whom he had at least another eight or nine children. The family moved Canada when Milton was 14. They settled in Vulcan County, Alberta.

After completing a two-year mission to Australia in 1915, Milton settled in Glenwood, Alberta, which is about 22 kilometers from Cardston as the crow flies. There he worked as a farm labourer. Sometime afterwards, he met Hazel Nelson, who he married in Cardston on April 13, 1919.

^{Milton’s calling card from his time as a Mormon missionary in Adelaide, Australia}

Hazel’s family was amongst the earliest settlers of  Cardston, Alberta, which Mormon immigrants from the United States founded in 1887. Her parents, John Alexander Nelson and Ella Elizabeth Thomas settled there in 1890. Six of their 12 children were born in Utah; the other six were born in Canada. Hazel and her sister Irene were born on December 15, 1899. They were the first twins born in Cardston. Sadly, Irene passed away five weeks later, but Hazel lived to be 67.

^{Because Hazel is listed first, I take it to mean that she was born first.}

The year after they married, Milton and Hazel had the first of their nine children, my grandfather Leo. Shortly afterwards, the family moved to Nampa, Idaho, where Milton worked at an orchard with his in-laws. In Nampa they had three more children before permanently returning to Canada in 1924.

By 1927, the family had settled in Magrath, where Milton and Hazel spent the rest of their lives. While he continued to do farm work over the decades, Milton had a wide variety of jobs. In the early 1940s he worked as a plumber. Milton later worked in a woolen mill, where he lost a finger of his left hand in a work injury. Milton also worked for a short time as a grave digger around 1950. By 1958, when he was 67, Milton retired.

My mother has told me many stories about him over the years. One story that she has recounted many times is that her grandfather would often talk about how, according to the bible, no man was meant to live more than 72 years. Milton died on September 10, 1964, the day after he turned 73.

I also have a small cache of letters Milton wrote to my grandfather in the 1940s. Most of them were gentle admonishments, such as disapproving of my grandfather working in establishments that served alcohol, coffee, and tea, or telling him that it was time to stop seeing the Catholic girl he had been dating and to find a nice Mormon girl to settle down with. Fortunately for me, my grandfather did not follow that advice, as that Catholic girl became his wife and my grandmother!

^{Screenshot of the entry for Hazel at Find a Grave, showing the headstone she shares with Milton.}

Hazel was 64 when Milton passed away. Around that time she moved to a seniors’ home in Cardston, which she derisively called “the old fools’ home”. There she met a widower, Albert Beaves, who she married in July 1967. Eight weeks later, Hazel passed away. My mother literally went from the funeral to the hospital, where I was born.

^{The newlyweds, Hazel Nelson and Albert Beaves, about July 5, 1967.}

^{“The Old Fool’s Home” – Chinook Lodge in Cardston, Alberta}