I was born on October 20, 1954 in Vernal, Utah to Lloy and Barney Sessions. I was the oldest child of six children, five of which grew to adulthood, four married and had families. I spent most of my young life in Vernal and my memories are of summers with friends fishing in the canal, digging underground huts in the back field and catching frogs or water snakes at the local frog pond. Winters in Vernal were long and cold but boys can usually find things to do skating on the frozen frog pond or tubing down nearby hills. After the roads froze over, it was even possible to ice skate on the streets.

While growing up I missed a lot of school because of regular bouts of bronchitis and this probably contributed to my rather short stature. The time I spent ill in bed, was used to build model airplanes and rockets.

I also remember spending a good deal of time in trouble because of my mischief. The passage of time has allowed me to forget most of the details but I suppose I was a bit of a trouble maker and worked hard to make it an art form. I had two different groups of friends; one group that were the minority non-LDS kids in the area and the other group were the kids I associated with at church. The kind of trouble I got into usually was determined by which group I was with at the time. Luckily I was born to wise and patient parents who knew when to love, when to discipline, and when to just grit their teeth and hang on. Mostly I think they just hoped that some teachings of the gospel would seep in, in spite of my contrary actions.

My living grandparents all lived in Vernal as well. Grandma Ida and Grandpa Buell Bennett had a house in south Vernal, a farm further south outside of town, and a two-room cabin on the mountains north of Vernal. Grandpa Bennett taught me how to fish and I caught my first trout out of the small stream that ran in front of the cabin area. After that I was hooked on fishing, hunting and all outdoors activities.

My parents built a new brick house in Vernal when I was about five. An apartment was built in one half of the basement for my other Grandmother, Mary Erma Moosman Sessions. She insisted on being called "Granny" and was an important part of our family until her death in 1983. I had a bedroom in the other half of the basement. Because Granny had been raised on the Ute Indian Reservation, she grew up fearing the Indians. Even in her advanced age, she would sometimes have nightmares that the Indians were going to get her and would scream for help in her sleep. Either my father or myself would get out of bed and go wake her up. After a relieved laugh and apology, we could all go back to bed again.

It was wonderful coming home to a house filled with the smell of Granny's homemade bread and rolls. There were evenings when we would simply eat her bread and milk for our supper. Her fresh cinnamon rolls were my personal favorite.

I graduated from Uintah High School in 1972 and figured I had been released from a world of torture. My plans were to spend the rest of my days hiking, fishing and hunting in the Uintah Basin. I took jobs simply to pay for these pass times. I worked for the Ashley Valley Co-op pumping gas and changing the oil on pickup trucks. I then worked at the local Chevrolet dealership in the parts department and then at local automobile part stores. I learned to weld working at Peterson Welding who did work for the oil fields. In all of these jobs, I was disturbed at the quality of people I was forced to work with (non-LDS) and worried that I was going to end up like them. These people truly lived lives of quiet desperation and all seemed resigned to it. They didn't seem to know what was important in life.

After high school, my friends began to marry, have kids and divorce (the non-LDS group) or were going on LDS church missions to different parts of the world and then going to college (the church group). When I was old enough to go on a church mission, I made sure that my parents and my Bishop understood that I wasn't interested. They weren't surprised.

Sometime in 1973, I seriously read The Book of Mormon for the first time. This quickly put my life in perspective for me and I suddenly had a great desire to share the Gospel with others. I announced, to many surprised individuals, that I was going on a two-year church mission. I was called to serve in the England SouthWest (name changed to England Bristol) Mission and left for England in January 1974. I served in the Cardiff (Wales), Llaneflli (Wales), Dibden Perleu, and Monmouth areas as well as six months in the mission office assisting President Arnold Knapp. I returned home to the great United States in January 1976, the United States Bi-centennial celebration year.

Another missionary that had gone on his mission the same time as I had, and was also from Vernal, was Kent Bowden. He and I served in one area at the same time though with different companions. After our missions were over, we arranged to tour Paris, France and Switzerland before going home. After arriving home, he suggested we go to college at Brigham Young University. Since I didn't have any other plans, I went.

To help pay expenses and tuition, I found a job with Western Beaver Farms, a company that raised beavers for the pelts as well as specialty meat. This involved traveling around the valley cutting specific types of trees and then feeding the trees to the beavers who were housed in special concrete pens with a stream of water flowing through them. There were beaver ranches near the Provo airport, in Bluffdale near the state prison, and the largest farm on State Street in Orem, near the freeway.

During the summer, I returned to Vernal and found work at Uintah County in a newly created mosquito control department called Uintah County Mosquito Abatement. This job involved spraying swamps and standing water for mosquito larvae or fogging areas to control the adult mosquitos.

So I guess you could say, mosquitos and beavers paid for my college.

I met my future wife at Brigham Young University. After pursuing her for several years, Nancy Joyce Markham finally agreed to marry me on March 1st, 1979 at the Manti Temple. We made our home in a smokey rental apartment until we could purchase our first house in Vernal. Our son, Cory Alexander Sessions was born a month premature on November 13th, 1979. After living in our first home for one year, we had a home built for us in the Naples area, south of Vernal.

During this time I worked at the mosquito abatement and was soon assistant director under Dr. Steven Romney who was the director. A friend from my beaver farm days, Lou Butler came to visit us and brought with him a "personal computer" that he was selling for a store in Ogden. Soon I was hooked on selling Apple II+ computer systems with him. This progressed until I left the mosquito abatement and opened a computer store in Vernal that was associated with the Computer Store in Ogden.

Then bad times hit the economy of the Uintah Basin when oil prices drastically dropped. Soon the computer store deal fell apart, too. We tried real estate and earned our real estate licenses but that industry was hurting, too. Soon we fled for the Wasatch Front and I found work at a computer store in south Salt Lake while we rented a house in Pleasant Grove, Utah. Later I worked in a computer store in Orem and we purchased a house at 1018 West 1770 North, Orem where we still reside (1999).

While living in Orem, my wife and I became licensed foster care providers for the state of Utah. We had a number of children live with us while their own families worked out their personal problems. We adopted two girls who came to live with us as babies. We adopted Shantisha Lindsey Sessions September 26, 1988. She had been born June 25, 1986 and was nine months old when she came to live with us March 17, 1987. We also adopted Chonsie Joy Sessions in 1994. Chonsie was born March 26, 1990 and was four and a half months old when she came to our home.

I worked for 11 years at Novell in Orem, Utah as a network technician and Nancy works part time at Aspen Elementary. Our son Cory, also worked at Novell (in Provo) before being called on a LDS mission to Salvador, Brazil. When Cory's mission in Brazil ended in May of 2001, Nancy and I flew down to Brazil to meet him. We toured through Brazil for two weeks flying to the cities of Salvador, Petrolina, Recife, Iquacu, Rio and Sao Paulo. That was a great experience and a good chance to reacquaint ourselves with our son who had been gone for two long years.

As kind of a hobby, since 1989 I have been trying to hike all of the canyons in southern Utah. My brother, David usually accompanies me. Sometimes we can only get away for a Saturday so we will drive down in the morning, hike all afternoon and drive home after dark. Mostly this is just an excuse to enjoy wonderous places and take pictures. I have also been attempting to document all of the large natural arches and bridges in Utah - about 456 of them at last count.

In the spring of 1999, Nancy fell while hiking in southern Utah's Canyonlands National Park (without me!) and broke her leg in two places. After the park rangers and ambulance crews got her to the hospital in Monticello they decided they couldn't handle the necessary surgery. She was then transported by ambulance to the Provo hospital where I finally caught up with her. After surgery to insert two metal brackets and 17 screws, Nancy began a long recovery with several infection complications and additional surgeries to remove one bracket. She still has the other. It didn't help her recovery that she is also a insulin dependant diabetic. Still, soon enough, she was back on both feet again.

In January of 2004, our two teenage daughters were involved in a serious automobile wreck in Orem. While riding as passengers in a crew cab pickup truck, the driver (a guy friend of Tisha's) ran a red light and t-boned a car while driving too fast. Tisha was in the front seat and Chonsie, with Terran York (one of Chonsie's girl friends) were in the back seat. Only the driver had his seat belt on. Tisha should have gone through the front windshield and thrown from the vehicle. Instead, she somehow ended up under the dash. Chonsie flew over the seat and hit the front windshield with her head.They both had concussions and Tisha had a cut in her spleen. Chonsie spent less than a week in the hospital while Tisha was there for about 10 days. Amazingly, there were no lasting effects from the wreck - except on the parents who aged twelve years that month. However, we are all extremely grateful to the Lord for His blessings of protection and support. And NO ONE ever forgets to put on their seat belt when we get in a car!

I met Eva Mae Sessions Perakis about 1997 at a Sessions family reunion in Woodland, Utah and volunteered with helping her put together a family history book we called "Sessions Family Forever." While she did all of the hard work by gathering the many histories and pictures, I digitally organized the information and prepared it for publishing. I believe we only printed 150 copies of this 639 page document and those copies were quickly snapped up by Sessions family members. While this project became a major headache and a major part of my life until it was published in 1999, I now mostly just remember what a great experience it was working with Eva to create this book. What a wonderful, dedicated and special person she is.

As I have worked with these histories, I have gotten to know the Sessions family in a special way and develop a real appreciation for our pioneer ancestors. I have been struck with the thought that our lives are the reward for our ancestor's diligence and faith. In the scriptures, God often rewarded individuals who had passed the tests of faith and endurance, by blessing their children, their children's children and so on. If our ancestors, who suffered and sacrificed so much for the Gospel, can look down on us from heaven, they must surely be pleased to see so many of us with families living in safe communities, warm homes, and surrounded by modern conveniences. We enjoy (and take for granite) the blessings of nearby hospitals, schools, and churches, an abundance of food, educational opportunities and even entertainment choices. At no time in the history of this world, have any people been so blessed as we are here and now. Perhaps we need to be remember that we did not earn these blessing -- our ancestors earned them for us.