William Warner Player

Player/Smith/Hodgkinson
Today's Flashback adds a genealogy fan chart for the Kent and Sue Cornwall family tree.  This will  show viewers where subject ancestors fit in the family lineage.

• Bright-yellow highlighted ancestors are the first converts of that family line.  Their stories have been the subject of previous blog posts.
• The Orange highlighted ancestor is the subject of this THIS post.
• Pale-yellow highlighted ancestors are a continuation of Church membership .
• The other pale colors delineate the main branches of the family tree - Cornwall (blue) - Neeley (green) - Hodgkinson (red) - Smith (creme).

Our highlighted ancestor today is William Warner Player.  He is the father of the ancestor that is highlighted in orange -  Charles Warner Player.  William Warner Player is one generation past the beautiful fan chart that dad created, but we will talk about both men.
William Warner Player (1793-1873) was the  youngest child of Charles and Ann Warner Player.  He was born on March 3, 1793 in Chelsea Middlesex England.  We don't have any information on his early years but we know that in 1821 William married Zilah Sanders Brown. They moved shortly after that to the Potteries (the home of the pottery industry) where William was a stone mason. In 1840 the Player family joined the LDS Church. In 1842 William, Zillah and their four children sailed to America. They sailed on the ship Hanover.  It sailed from Liverpool March 12th, 1842, with about two hundred Saints on board bound for Nauvoo, via New Orleans.  Amos Fielding was in charge and they arrived in Nauvoo with about one hundred and fifty of his company, May 14th, 1842. William being a skilled stone mason began to work on the temple, he was 49.  Charles who was 15 at the time also worked on the temple. 

The Players joined the Horton D. Haight company that left for the Salt Lake Valley on August 10th 1862 and arrived October 19, 1862.  There were 650 individuals in the company when it began its journey from the outfitting post at Florence, Nebraska (now Omaha).  By googling his name  I found a book written in 1993 by  Madelyn Player.  It is called the "Legacy of William Warner Player".  It is archived at several libraries including BYU and BYU-I, but the title gives us a clue of what his priority was.  The legacy -  "My heart was to build another temple of the Lord."  When William arrived in Salt Lake it appears that he was anxious to work on the Salt Lake Temple, but now he was 69 years old and Charles was 35. They both worked on the temple for many years.  William Warner Player died 11 years after they arrived and twenty years before the Salt Lake Temple was dedicated.  I am looking forward to getting access to that book so that I can learn more about this great Player family and our heritage.