Leave All and Follow Me: Matthew Ivory's Choice Between Family and Faith (1847)

Matthew Hayes Ivory, Jr. was born July 13, 1809, in Philadelphia, the last of five children of Matthew Hayes Ivory, Sr. and Ann McNulty. He was a seeker: at twenty-five he tried the Presbyterian Church, then the Baptist, then the Catholic, still unsatisfied. Then he met the Latter-day Saint missionaries, and on February 1, 1840 he was baptized by Joseph Newton. He had finally found what he was looking for — and his wife's family turned on him for it.

By the winter of 1846–47 his wife Mary Susan demanded he give up his faith or leave the family. Matthew made the great sacrifice: he departed from his wife and seven children and went west alone to join the Saints at Winter Quarters, preparing for the great exodus to the Rocky Mountains. On April 3, 1847, before starting west, he received a patriarchal blessing at Winter Quarters from John Smith.

A few days later Matthew left in the first company of pioneers under Brigham Young, in the ten commanded by John Brown, and entered the Salt Lake Valley with the main body on July 24, 1847. That August he left the valley again with Brigham Young, returning east to help the main body of the Church make the migration west — the man who had lost his own family spending his strength to bring other families across.

In 1855, still hoping for his first wife and children for time and all eternity, Matthew returned to Philadelphia to see Mary Susan. The years had softened her heart, but not enough to accept the faith. While there he was arrested for bigamy. Mary Susan refused to testify against him — so a bitterly embittered nephew gladly agreed to do it. On the day set for the hearing, Matthew appeared in court and waited for his accuser, who never came. Matthew was released. He later learned that the nephew had been stricken with a fatal illness and had died.

He brought a second family west in 1857, built a life in Beaver, Monroe, Manti, and Eagle Valley, Nevada, and at sixty years old raised his seven motherless children after his wife Mary Judith died in 1870. In the spring of 1879, at nearly seventy, he accepted a call to serve a mission to New Jersey, returning that September 12.

In 1885, an expert mechanic, Matthew had agreed to fit up the millstones of a newly erected grain chopper. Before leaving the job he made one final test. All went well for a time — then one of the stones came loose while revolving at tremendous speed and struck him in the stomach, killing him almost instantly on October 17, 1885. He was buried in the Mountain View Cemetery in Beaver. His family's record remembered him as a man exacting in all his actions, who taught law and order in every household duty — and who, when the whole world asked him to choose between his family and his God, chose God, trusting the promise of eternity.