Among the families who settled in Ontario County, New York, in 1816, was that of one Joseph Smith. It consisted of himself, his wife, and nine children. The fourth of these children, Joseph Smith, Jr., became the Mormon prophet. The Smiths are said to have been of Scotch ancestry. It was the mother, however, who exercised the larger influence on her son's life, and she has left very minute details of her own and her father's family.* Her father, Solomon Mack, was a native of Lyme, Connecticut. The daughter Lucy, who became Mrs. Joseph Smith, Sr., was born in Gilsum, Cheshire County, New Hampshire, on July 8, 1776. Mr. Mack was remembered as a feeble old man, who rode around the country on horseback, using a woman's saddle, and selling his own autobiography. The "tramp" of those early days often offered an autobiography, or what passed for one, and, as books were then rare, if he could say that it contained an account of actual adventures in the recent wars, he was certain to find purchasers. * "Biographical Sketches of Joseph Smith and his Progenitors for Many Generations," Lucy Smith. One of the few copies of this book in existence lies before me. It was printed at the author's expense about the year 1810. It is wholly without interest as a narrative, telling of the poverty of his parents, how he was bound, when four years old, to a farmer who gave him no education and worked him like a slave; gives some of his experiences in the campaigns against the French and Indians in northern New York and in the war of the Revolution, when he was in turn teamster, sutler, and privateer; describes with minute detail many ordinary illnesses and accidents that befell him; and closes with a recital of his religious awakening, which was deferred until his seventy-sixth year, while he was suffering with rheumatism. At that time it seemed to him that he several times "saw a bright light in a dark night," and thought he heard a voice calling to him. Twenty-two of the forty-eight duodecimo pages that the book contains are devoted to hymns "composed," the title-page says, "on the death of several of his relatives," not all by himself. One of these may be quoted entire:-- "My friends, I am on the ocean, So sweetly do I sail; Jesus is my portion, He's given me a pleasant gale. "The bruises sore, In harbor soon I'll be, And see my redeemer there That died for you and me."