John Sant

The following information comes from http://www.allthingsancestor.com/ancestors-of-sandra-gale/john-sant-1811-1887 

John Sant was born to Abel Sant and Margaret Bayley in England.  He was the seventh of twelve children born to his parents.  When John was just ten years of age, his father was convicted of having a file in his lunch pail and sentenced to the prison ship which traveled to Australia.  This method of creating a prison population to do the work of the new colony was common in John’s day.  Abel was required to stay away from England for seven years.  One can imagine how heartbreaking it must have been for this father and for his wife and the twelve children he left behind.  In fact, Abel Sant died in Picton, New South Wales without ever returning to England or seeing his wife and children again.  The one exception was an adult son who traveled to see his father and was successful.

When John was twenty he met and married Mary Shaw.  They, too, became the parents of twelve children. When John was walking home from work one day, where he had been hauling goods on a side canal of a large river, he met two missionaries from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day-Saints.  The gave John their message and he is said to have told them that “this is what I have been waiting for all of my life”.  He studied their message and was baptized.  Mary took a little longer to join him but eventually did as did their children.  The family made an “America Box” where they saved money for their trip to America.  They sacrificed in every way possible but still, it took five years for them to make the journey.  John would later tell his posterity that before leaving England he had a dream wherein he saw his eventual home and his posterity.  He said that after the dream he was not discouraged but encouraged to try harder to find the money to make the trip.

The family sailed in 1860, leaving behind two married daughters.  One, Elizabeth Sant Winterbottom is our direct ancestor.  Her ancestral summary shares her experiences and her migrations.  It took the Sant family five months to travel from England to Smithfield, Utah.  From there they went to Bloomington, Idaho in 1863 where they lived in a dugout for the first year.  In 1869 they moved to Oxford, Idaho and in 1870 to Clifton, Idaho where they lived the remainder of their lives.  John and his sons owned 500 acres of land which they farmed together.  They built schools, a church and roads.  Most of the family lived and died in the community of Clifton.

John and Mary Sant are buried in the Clifton City Cemetery, surrounded by almost one hundred grave stones of members of their family.

Here is a fantastic article with pictures about John Sant's immigration to America