Ursula Joan Pettley

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Ursula Joan Pettley Cornia: From Lethbridge to Roy

Born on the Alberta Prairie

Ursula Joan Pettley was born on 2 November 1920 in Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada, the daughter of Edgar John Pettley and Violet Anne Toynbee. She arrived as a prairie winter was setting in, in a coal-mining and farming city on the Oldman River[1][2][3] whose people still remembered when it was little more than a railway point and a cluster of mines.

She was the fifth of six children. Ahead of her came Walter Frederick, born in 1912, Lionel Edgar Courtney in 1913, Lillian Elizabeth in 1915, and Theodora Edith in 1919, barely a year and a half older than Ursula. The youngest, Frances Patricia, followed in 1925. A family of six spread over thirteen years meant that Ursula grew up as one of the little ones, with two brothers old enough to work by the time she started school and a sister so close in age that the two of them were nearly a pair.

Her parents were both English, and both had come to southern Alberta as part of the same wave of emigration.[4] Edgar had been born in Bromley, Kent, in 1890, and he crossed to Canada in August 1906, landing at Quebec City at the age of about sixteen. Violet had been born in Lambeth, London, in 1893, and by 1911 she and Edgar were both living in the Medicine Hat district. Violet knew early loss. Her mother, Anne Weddall, died in London in 1899, and her father, George Ernest Toynbee, died in Lethbridge in 1909, two years after coming to Canada. Violet was an orphan in a new country before she was out of her teens, and she would face loss again, with six children of her own.

Ursula's name was an uncommon one, and the people who wrote it down rarely got it right. It appears as Ursilla, Ursulla, Ursual and even Ursula Jean, while her middle name, Joan, was the one that stuck: her husband wrote of her as Joan, her sister's obituary called her Mrs. Joan P. Cornia, and her own obituary called her Joan throughout. From here on, she is Joan, as she was to the people who knew her.

Across the Border at Vermont

In 1922 the family entered the United States through Vermont, crossing the border from Canada. Her mother's records place that crossing in October 1922. Joan was 1 or 2 years old. She would have had no memory of Canada; the country she grew up in, and the one whose habits and accent she absorbed, was the United States.

The early 1920s saw a steady stream of Canadians moving south, many of them British-born families for whom Canada had been only a first stop.[5][6] Crossings through the St. Albans district of Vermont were a principal route for those travelling by rail from Quebec and the east, and inspectors there recorded families who were moving permanently to American cities and towns. For a young couple with five children under ten, it was a second emigration in less than a generation, and a much larger gamble than a single man's.

A Father Lost, a Faith Taken Up

Edgar John Pettley died in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1928. Joan was 7 or 8 years old. He was about thirty-eight. His death left Violet a widow in her mid-thirties with six children, the youngest only about three, in a country where she had no parents to turn to. For the older boys, it almost certainly meant earning money as soon as they could; for the younger girls, it meant a childhood shaped by a mother who now carried the household alone.

On 21 March 1929, not long after her father's death, Joan was baptized as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Children in Latter-day Saint families were baptized at eight, the age the Church considers the beginning of accountability,[7][8] and Joan was baptized at that age. Southern Alberta, where her parents had married and started their family, held one of the largest concentrations of Latter-day Saints outside Utah, in towns such as Cardston, Raymond and Magrath.[9][10][11] Her paternal grandmother, Jane Elizabeth Wilson, died in Raymond in 1908, and her grandfather, John Pettley, died in Glenwood, in Cardston County, in 1939. Whatever the family's path to the faith, the Church became the steady thread of Joan's life, one she would hold to through every move that followed.

In 1930 she was counted in her mother's household. Violet Pettley was the head of a family of children who were moving from childhood into adulthood during the hardest years of the Great Depression.

Growing Up in Miami

By 1935 the family was living in Miami, Florida, where Joan, at fourteen, was counted in the state census. It was a world away from Lethbridge's winters. Miami in the mid-1930s was a city still recovering from the collapse of the Florida land boom and the devastating hurricane of 1926, and then from the Depression that came on top of them, but it was growing again, sustained by tourism, construction and a steady flow of newcomers from the North.[12][13] For a teenager it meant palm-lined streets, heat for most of the year, and a city where nearly everyone seemed to have come from somewhere else, which suited a family that had already crossed one ocean and one international border.

Being a Latter-day Saint in Miami in those years[14][15] meant belonging to a small congregation in a region where the Church was a minority faith. Members in the American South often gathered in modest branches, sometimes in rented halls, where everyone was needed to teach, lead music or keep the organizations running.[16][17] A girl raised in such a branch learned early that faith was something you participated in, not merely something you attended.

A Stenographer and a Citizen

In 1940, Joan was still living in her mother's household in Miami, and at twenty she was working as a stenographer in a department store. Stenography was one of the most respectable and sought-after jobs open to a young woman in 1940.[18][19] It required real skill: shorthand taken down at speed, accurate typing, correspondence and records kept in order for the managers and buyers of a busy store.[20][19] In a household headed by a widowed mother, her wages very likely helped keep the family going, as working daughters' pay commonly did in those years.

On 16 June 1942, at the age of 21, Joan became a naturalized citizen of the United States in Florida. She had lived in the country since she was a toddler,[21][22] but legally she had remained a Canadian-born British subject, and since 1940 all noncitizens in the United States had been required to register with the government.[21][22] Six months after Pearl Harbor, with the country at war and the Florida coast patrolled against German submarines, citizenship carried new weight.[23][24] As an adult she could apply in her own name, and she did, making formal a belonging that her whole childhood had already established.

Married in the Salt Lake Temple

The war also brought her a husband. James Daniel Cornia was born in 1918 in Brigham City, Utah, and in 1940 he was still living there. In his personal history, James recalled that after he was discharged from the Army he bought Joan an engagement ring, and that their plan was for her to come to Utah to be married in the temple. For a Latter-day Saint couple, a temple marriage carried the promise that their union would last beyond death, and in 1944 there was no temple anywhere near Florida; the nearest were in the American West.[25][26][15]

Saying yes to that plan meant leaving her job, her mother, and the only city she had known since childhood for a journey of more than two thousand miles. James wrote, with a soldier's bluntness, that "Joan kept stalling about coming and finally I told her to either come or forget about it." She came. Joan and her mother travelled by train to Utah during the first part of February 1944. Wartime trains were notoriously crowded with servicemen and civilians alike, and the trip across the country would have taken several days. That Violet made the trip with her daughter says a great deal: the woman who had raised six children alone after 1928 saw her fifth child to the altar herself.

Joan and James were married in the Salt Lake Temple in Salt Lake City on 14 February 1944, Valentine's Day. She was 23. "Our honeymoon was 1 day in Salt Lake," James remembered, and "we didn't have much money in fact Mama Pettley gave us $20." That twenty dollars, a meaningful gift in 1944 from a widow of modest means, was a small and generous start to a marriage that would last more than half a century.

Building a Family in Miami

The plan had been to marry in Utah, but the young couple did not stay there. By 1945 Joan and James were living in Dade County, Florida, and in April 1950 they were in Miami. The Utah-born husband had made his home in his wife's city, near her mother and sisters, and the Pettley family's Florida roots now included a Cornia household. Church census rolls counted her both as a young Pettley and as a married Cornia. Her name moved from one family listing to another, but she remained part of the same congregation of believers.

Joan's obituary names three children: Mary, Diane and James. Her son, James Richard Cornia, was born in 1957, when Joan was in her late thirties. In the years that followed, her days were shaped by children growing up in the postwar America of new suburbs, school schedules and Church activities organized for every age. For a Latter-day Saint mother, the Church's organizations for women, children and youth were a natural extension of home, and Joan's later reputation for service suggests that she was very much part of them.

Twenty-Five Years in Tucson

At some point after her Miami years, Joan and James moved west to Tucson, Arizona, where she lived for twenty-five years. A quarter-century is long enough for a place to become home in every sense: neighbours known for decades, a ward family, children grown and married, grandchildren born. Tucson in those years was a fast-growing desert city, and its Latter-day Saint community was far larger than the small Florida branches of Joan's youth, with the Mesa Arizona Temple only a short drive to the north.

Her obituary remembered that she "loved the gospel and served in many capacities in the various organizations of the church." Those organizations, the Relief Society for women, the Primary for children, the Sunday School and the youth programs, ran almost entirely on volunteers, and members were called to teach, lead, keep records and care for the sick and grieving.[27][28] A stenographer's trained hand for organization and correspondence would have been welcome in any of them. She was remembered, too, as "a friend to everyone."

In 1977 her mother, Violet, died in Miami, and the same year her older sister Lillian died as well. Joan was 56 or 57. Losing both in a single year severed much of her remaining tie to Florida, where Violet had lived out her life in the city to which she had brought her children decades before.

Last Years in Roy

Eventually Joan and James left Tucson for Roy, Utah, a city in Weber County a short drive south of James's birthplace, Brigham City.[29][30][31] After a married life spent mostly in Florida and Arizona, the move brought James back to the country of his youth, and brought Joan to the state where she had married him more than fifty years earlier.

These were years of farewells. Her brother Walter died in 1992, and her brother Lionel in 1995. James Daniel Cornia died in Roy in 1997, after fifty-three years of marriage. Theodora, the sister born just ahead of her, died in 2000, and her obituary named Joan among her family. Joan was living in Roy in January 2000 and again that July.

Ursula Joan Pettley Cornia died at her home in Roy, Utah, on 19 July 2000, of natural causes. She was 79. Her obituary noted that she had been preceded in death by her husband, two sisters and two brothers; her younger sister Frances survived her. She left three children, Mary Kizerian of Corpus Christi, Texas, Diane Garriott of Fountain Valley, California, and James R. Cornia of Anaheim, California, along with eleven grandchildren and a great-grandchild.

Her funeral was held at the Roy stake center of the Church at 11 a.m. on Tuesday, 25 July 2000, and she was buried that day in the Roy City Cemetery. In place of flowers, Joan asked that people give to their favourite charity, and her family suggested the American Parkinson Disease Information and Referral Center in Salt Lake City. It was a characteristic request from a woman remembered for her friendships: she turned the attention of her own funeral outward, toward someone else's need.

Legacy

Joan's life was a long series of crossings. Her grandparents and parents came from England to the Alberta prairie; she came from Canada through Vermont as a toddler; she grew up in the heat of Miami; she took a wartime train across the continent to be married; she put down roots in the Arizona desert; and she came to rest in Utah, in the state where her married life had begun. Through every one of those moves, the faith she was baptized into at eight, months after her father's death, stayed with her.

The details that survive about her are small and telling. A name, Ursula, that strangers kept misspelling, and a middle name, Joan, that everyone who loved her used instead. A department-store stenographer who became an American citizen in her own name at twenty-one. A bride who made a young soldier wait, then crossed the country on a winter train with her mother beside her. A one-day honeymoon in Salt Lake City, paid for in part with twenty dollars from Mama Pettley, the widowed mother who had kept six children together and then travelled two thousand miles to see her daughter married on Valentine's Day.

The marriage begun on that slim budget lasted fifty-three years and produced three children, eleven grandchildren and a great-grandchild by the time Joan died. Those who wrote her obituary did not list accomplishments or offices; they said she was a friend to everyone and would be missed by many who loved her. For a woman who spent her life arriving in new places, from a Vermont border station to a Miami branch, a Tucson ward and finally a home in Roy, it is a fitting summary: wherever she went, she made people her own.

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