McKinney, Dan Carroll McKinney, Thelma Josephine McKinney, and Gladys Violet McKinney. Eight years later she married an Arizona Sheriff, Joseph Thomas McKinney, and they had four more children, but they later separated, and Dortha moved to California sometime between 19, along with her children with Mr. John Henry Rollins' 20-year old widow, my great grandmother, Dortha Roxana Madsen, (the daughter of a Danish immigrant who came to America in 1853 at the age of 9, and a girl of German ancestry born in Iowa), was left with two children to raise alone, her daughter, my grandmother, Dortha Evelyn Rollins, and son John Delbert Rollins. They had eleven children, but sadly four of them died young, including my great grandfather, John Henry Rollins, Jr., who was killed at the age of just 24 years old when he fell from a wagon in which he was riding and his head was crushed. They encountered lots of problems with outlaws, Indians, and the natural disasters common to those times. At the request of the church John Henry, his wife Nancy, their children, and her mother Margaret, along with other extended family members, left Utah in about 1879 and settled in Snowflake, Arizona, in 1880 when it was the wild frontier. James and Eveline's son, John Henry Rollins, Sr., married Nancy Malinda West, daughter of Samuel Walker West and Margaret Cooper of Tennessee, who were also early Mormon pioneers having joined the church in the 1830's and arriving in Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1843. James married Hannah before departing for San Bernardino, and together they had 13 children. When the church sent James to San Bernardino, California, in 1851 they instructed him to take a plural wife, a 16-year old orphan girl, Hannah Hulme, who had been assisting James and Eveline in their home with household duties and raising of their children. James had 9 children with his first wife, Eveline, who was the daughter of Oliver Walker and Nancy Cressy of New York and New Jersey. They were both buried in the Lyman City Cemetery in Lyman, Uinta County, Wyoming. His wife, Eveline Walker Rollins, lived another 13 years and died in 1912. James Henry Rollins and his sisters, mother, aunt and uncle joined the Mormon Church in Ohio in the 1830's and moved from Ohio to Missouri, then Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, and finally in 1848, Utah, then in 1851 to California, back to Utah in 1857, and finally Wyoming in about 1896, where James died in 1899. After her husband died, she sent James Henry and his two sisters to live with her sister, Elizabeth Van Benthuysen and her husband, Sidney Algernon Gilbert, since they had no children of their own. James Henry's mother, Keziah Katurah Van Benthuysen, was a Dutch girl whose ancestors came from Holland to New Amsterdam (New York) in the 1650's. When James Henry was about 4 years old his father, John Porter Rollins, died in a shipping accident on Lake Erie while taking a boat load of cattle from New York to Canada in 1820. They were called back to Utah by the LDS Church in 1857 due to the coming of Johnson's Army. The church bought thousands of acres of land from the Mexican government for their settlement. My third great grandfather, James Henry Rollins, was one of the original settlers of San Bernardino, California, when the Mormons were sent there from Utah in 1851, one hundred years before I was born. I'm originally from Southern California, but have also lived in Pompano Beach-Florida, the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California, Portland-Oregon, North Hanover-New Jersey, and now Brenham-Texas, a small town about half way between Houston and Austin.
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