Featured on my Facebook page, and posted here for archiving.

Martha Deseret Grant (later Boyle) – “Dessie” to friends and family – was born in the European Mission headquarters of Liverpool, England, where her mother, Emily Wells Grant, lived with her father, Heber J. Grant. Missionaries in Europe had seldom, if ever, been accompanied by their families to that point, but in 1886 Emily joined Heber in England to protect both of them from prosecution for plural marriage; their first child, Dessie, was born a missionary.

Dessie accompanied her parents and five younger sisters back to England from 1903-1906 when Heber returned as president of the European Mission. The outgoing mission president objected to the presence of the girls, especially of Dessie and her next younger sister Grace – wouldn’t both girls, in their late teens, be a distraction to the elders? If so, that was the elders’ problem – Emily had raised her daughters to be missionaries themselves, not to flirt with the elders. The girls stayed.

For part of the time during those years of 1903-1906, Dessie lived in Berlin, studying music and German, and serving Church members there. One evening, after the missionaries in Berlin had addressed a meeting, Dessie met a non-Mormon scholar from Utah who had visited the meeting to see friends from home. He was not complimentary. “Miss Grant, those Elders simply murdered the German language!” he complained. He had read some Mormon books, he told her, and he offered to address future meetings, in carefully outlined speeches, and “without murdering the German language.”

Dessie’s response: “Did you notice that each of those three Elders said that he knew that God lived, that Jesus was the Christ, and that Joseph Smith was a Prophet of the living God? Now, Professor, you do not know any of these three things, and I would sooner have one of our Elders murder the language and bear testimony of the truth, than to hear the finest sermon from one who had no such knowledge and no such spirit to guide him in what he might say.”

There are more formal – and less pixelated; sorry – portraits of Dessie Grant from those years, but I love this one, cropped from a group shot of missionaries and family, with her smile and her complete unconcern for the breeze blowing that lock of hair out of place. Dessie seems to have been a young woman who knew what mattered more.