A documented pioneer life
25 September 1833 — 17 March 1918
English convert. Atlantic emigrant. Plains traveler. Bear Lake pioneer. Teacher, missionary, civic leader, family historian, and patriarch.
His story survives unusually well: hundreds of pages of journals, two mission certificates, an 1885 missionary portrait, a temple dedication ticket, family photographs, a preserved cabin, and generations of family history work.
A life in motion
1854 · Atlantic passage
Thomas’s documented 1854 journey aboard the Germanicus opens the migration story: Liverpool, the Atlantic crossing, New Orleans, and then upriver toward St. Louis.
Chronology · V2.1
The timeline favors Thomas’s own journals and contemporary records. Later family histories are used as cross-checks, and contradictions are shown rather than quietly resolved.
1863 · Bear Lake Valley
Cabins, fence lines, wagons, winter weather, and the high mountain valley frame the place Thomas would help build — and remain connected to for the rest of his life.
“I stood in the presence of God.”
The surviving record
These are not decorative stand-ins. They are the actual family-history images currently attached to Thomas’s record or extracted from the source volumes used for this project.
Mary Matilda Wixom Sleight
Mary was born in Little Cottonwood in 1853 and came to Paris with the Wixom family in 1864. She married Thomas in 1867 and raised nine children with him in Bear Lake. When Thomas left for Britain in 1884, Mary remained in Paris with six children and gave birth to Richard Solomon while Thomas was abroad.
Her influence reaches far beyond the household. The Wixom Family History says Mary’s requests for ancestral information helped start the movement that ultimately produced the book. Decades later, Thomas and Mary’s granddaughter Ruth Sleight Widdison took on the enormous job of editing and typing the manuscript for publication.
1884–1886 · British Mission
Industrial streets, meeting-house doors, printed tracts, and the surviving 1885 portrait evoke Thomas’s return to Britain — this time as a missionary rather than an emigrant.
Research notes
Later Sleight and Wixom family sketches say Thomas came to America at about seventeen. Germanicus documentation and Thomas’s own 1917 recollection place his Atlantic crossing in 1854, at age twenty. V1 treats 1854 as the stronger date while retaining the older family tradition as a documented conflict.
A later Thomas Sleight newspaper recollection pairs dates with weekdays that do not align with the 1863 calendar. A preservation account based on the journals says Thomas was called September 14, left the next day, traveled eleven days, and saw snow September 28. The site therefore uses mid–late September 1863 where precision would overstate the evidence.
The 1963 Wixom history says 1858. The Church History Biographical Database gives 13 July 1857, and the surviving journal sequence fits the earlier date. V1 displays 1857 and keeps the discrepancy in the source record.
Source architecture
The goal is not to flatten generations of records into one polished biography. Each layer gets a different evidentiary weight.
1893–1918 · Temple & legacy
The Salt Lake Temple, the Bear Lake landscape, and the surviving record converge in Thomas’s later years — a life increasingly occupied with memory, ancestry, community history, and posterity.
The record keeps moving
In 1913 Thomas helped compile the names of Bear Lake’s first pioneers for the valley’s fiftieth-year celebration. A century later, the work continues with a different set of tools — digitized journals, searchable family histories, photographs, artifacts, and this website.
Return to 1833