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Urial Driggs -- The Father of the "Mormon" Driggs

1780 - 1846

Urial Driggs was born April 29, 1780, not quite four years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. His father and mother, Daniel and Ruth Graves Driggs, and their family lived in Connecticut. His early years were spent in the heart of the American Revolution.

Urial married Hannah Ford on October 26, 1800, at Farmington, Connecticut.

Sources give conflicting information, but it is thought that Urial and Hannah moved with Urial’s father Daniel and his family to Marcellus, Onondaga County, N. Y. The 1800 Census shows them there.

There were other moves to Allegheny County, Pennsylvania and Astabula County, Ohio. When "Urial and Hannah Driggs [and their family] moved from Pennsylvania to Ohio . . . the family embrace[d] Mormonism in an all-out spirit of sacrifice. They withstood the jeers and persecution and opened their souls to the message and proved themselves to be of the honest in heart. . . .

About 1840 “they moved with many other Mormon families to Nauvoo on the Mississippi River. Four years later Joseph Smith and his brother [were] assassinated, and thousands of inhabitants of this beautiful city were thrown into a state of confusion and discouragement. All were expelled from Nauvoo when the law yielded to ignorant mob influence.

“They crossed the Mississippi River and entered Lee County, Iowa, with many other families. Urial [who was now 66 years old] could not make the difficult journey and died on the trail, and was buried along the trail. . . .His sons fashioned a coffin from a log and buried him near a large walnut tree. . . . His wife died less than a year later and was buried in the wooded bluffs north of Kanesville, now Council Bluffs, Iowa. . . .”

He is revered as the Father of the “Mormon” branch of the Driggs family.

Source: Driggs Family in America: Book Two, L. Lynne Driggs and Harry Stoddard Driggs, 1971, pp. 26-27.