Jules Perrin and his wife Emma Roulin and their oldest daughter were baptized in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, early in 1905, followed that summer by two more of their children. Others, younger, would have to wait a few years before they were eligible. While in Neuchâtel, “I knew many missionaries, among them Brother [Serge] Ballif and Brother [James] Ba[r]ker, with whom I worked to make a new edition of the Book of Mormon in French.” (Serge Ballif, their former mission president, recalled the Perrin family well, but remembered that Jules’s work had been on a new translation of the Doctrine and Covenants.) For six months, they housed a young elder in their home

“When I was in the Church, I always had the desire to go to Utah or Idaho, but I didn’t have enough money – I had three boys and three girls, and in Switzerland life is hard, you can’t earn a lot of money.” The family kept in touch with some of the missionaries they had known who had returned to Utah and Idaho, and sometimes one missionary or another would offer to make a home for one of the children so that the Perrin family could gradually emigrate. “Maybe I should have accepted that, but our family is so loving that we couldn’t allow anything to separate one child from the others.”

At the end of 1911, a friend of the family who had emigrated to Argentina – the South American republic that welcomed so many millions of immigrants from around the world to establish colonies and build its fledgling industries – returned to Switzerland and told Jules of the economic opportunities there. The friend even offered to help the Perrin family emigrate.

Jules debated. He would have greater economic opportunities in Argentina, his older children could also work and contribute to the family’s emigration fund, and they would be somewhat closer to Utah. Maybe they could save enough to complete their emigration after a few years? They decided to go, to gamble that they wouldn’t be in South America for long before they could emigrate to be with the Saints.

And in some ways, the gamble succeeded. After six months, Jules could write that “things weren’t bad. I cultivate a tract for the owner – I work and grow corn and wheat, and we are all healthy, thank God.” But there was one detail that they hadn’t bargained on.

“But now we are filled with sadness, because there are no Latter-day Saints here. We never see a missionary – that’s what we miss most. I have three children who haven’t yet been baptized.

“In this land there are mostly Catholics, and nobody else thinks much about religion. As for us, we hold our worship in our home, and when we sing a good old Mormon hymn, that restores our hope and courage.”

Jules thought he would like to work as a missionary in Argentina, but he wasn’t sure he had the authority to do that, any more than he had the authority to baptize his children. Still, he and his family spoke to friends about the gospel “whenever the opportunity presents itself.”

“Do you think,” he wrote to a correspondent, “that rather than coming to South America, it would have been better to stay in Switzerland? Really, my life is much better than it was in Switzerland, excepting the spiritual side.” He estimated that it would cost $600 to bring his family from Argentina to Utah, and he needed to repay the money his friend had loaned him to bring them from Europe to South America. Could anyone in Utah loan him that money? He and his wife and children would work hard in Utah, he promised, to repay the loan as soon as possible.

But none of the missionaries he knew had that kind of money to spare, and the Church itself couldn’t provide funds for emigration – there were too many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other Saints who also would like to emigrate … and paying to bring emigrants to the U.S. might run afoul of the law anyway. The Perrin family would have to make it on their own.

Did they? Did their gamble that moving to South America would smooth the way for their further emigration to Utah pay off?

It did not, so far as I can tell. I can find no record of their entry into the U.S., nor of their applying for citizenship. They do not appear on later censuses of the United States. Their records on Family Search record births and baptisms, but then only a notation of DECEASED based on the impossibility of their surviving to the present – this is exactly the way all Family Search records appear when someone has become lost to the Church in one way or another.

It would be 14 years after the Perrins’ emigration before the first missionaries arrived in South America. By then, the family had lost all touch with the Church.

UPDATE:  I was wrong about this last bit!  On 13 May 1926, Rey L. Pratt, serving in Buenos Aires, records in his diary, “Wrote a letter to Jules Perrin.” No further detail, but enough to confirm that the Perrin family remained somehow, to some degree, in touch with the Church, and that they were aware of the coming of the missionaries in 1926.