The Split Vine, Pt. 1: Lincoln Kevin Kelly's Family History
Gentiles and Saints, Mormons and Masons
The Split Vine: The Kelly Family and Utah’s Complicated History of Mormons and Gentiles
On August 26, 1824, John Kelly was born in Kilmarnock, Scotland to Andrew Kelly and Elisabeth Wallace. He was the fourth of seven children, intellectually precocious, and went to work in a lawyer’s office at eight years of age. He would marry Mary Carmichael, and the couple would conceive four children together, but only one, John Carmichael Kelly, would survive to adulthood. John Carmichael Kelly’s siblings would all die of diphtheria in 1863; his mother Mary would languish with cancer and eventually pass in 1873, but not before selecting her replacement: Margaret Melville, whose half-sister Mary Jane Melville would marry John Carmichael Kelly the year before her death.
John Kelly’s son John C. Kelly would go on to father nine children; his father would give birth to nine other children. The narrative presented by the family of John Kelly is that his first wife Mary Carmichael selected a wife to replace her due to her impending death; the reality is that John Kelly’s first child with his second wife Mary Melville was born in 1867, a full six years before Mary Carmichael died. John Kelly had four children before his first wife passed on December 11, 1873, and the record states that John Carmichael Kelly built an adjoining rock room onto his house for his sick mother to come and live.
John Kelly was a polygamist, and his first wife died at their son’s home. The vine of the Kelly family split in two: John Carmichael Kelly’s progeny stayed within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints; his father’s children by Margaret Melville would leave the church to become Presbyterians and Congregationalists. The male children would become prominent within the Scottish Rite’s Grand Lodge of Utah and the El Kalah Shriners, as well as an obscure subset of the Scottish Rite and the Shriner’s, the Royal Order of Jesters.
John and Margaret Kelly’s first child, a daughter named Mary, died of whooping cough before she was four months old. His son Quinten Blair was born February 28, 1969, in Fillmore, where his father had been sent by Brigham Young after immigrating to Utah to teach a school in Fillmore. Quintin Blair Kelly, Eugene Wallace Kelly, and their sisters Viola and Eva were all listed as students of the Presbyterian School in Fillmore, Utah.