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Chapter 2: The Holmes Family

In the 1920s, as a young boy, I lived in a happy, very busy home.
My Mother was Ida Eldredge Holmes. Her father, Elnathan Eldredge
(fourth in successive generations to bear that name), walked over 1,000
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referred to historically as the Big Company of pioneers. His family ar-
rived in Salt Lake on September 17, 1847. Her mother was a second
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the Church ended polygamy in 1890, her mother was left alone and
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his businesses. As a result, Grandmother Eldredge had to fend for her-
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mother as a boy why she had agreed to be the second wife, and she
responded that she would rather have half of Elnathan Eldredge than all
of any other man. I thought that was romantic. Mother was the only
member of her family to go to college. She clerked in a downtown Salt
Lake department store and won scholarships to enable her to attend the
University of Utah. After three years there, she secured a teaching cer-
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her life, but when she married Dad, it was customary to quit working
outside the home.
Mother was a reader all her life and taught Sunday School until
she was at least 75 years old. Each Wednesday she studied her lesson
plan and sought new ways to make her lessons interesting and instruc-
tive.
Mother was a woman of enduring physical strength. Can a mod-
ern woman understand that she pulled out clothes from a washing ma-
chine, ran them through a wringer into a tub of rinse water, then lifted
wet clothes to run through a wringer into a tub of bluing solution, then
through a wringer to a rinse tub and then through a wringer to a holding
tub? The clothes then had to be hung on a line to dry. Recognize that,
in addition to sheets and towels and such, she washed, hung to dry, and
then hand-ironed a shirt for each male each day – at least 28 shirts per

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