Pratt family


The Pratt family is made up of the descendants of the Mormon pioneer brothers, Parley Parker Pratt and his brother Orson Pratt, whose father was Jared Pratt. It has many members in Utah, and other parts of the U.S. There are many branches of the Pratt family, such as the Romney Family and the Huntsman family.

Pratts

Selected family members

Family association

The Jared Pratt Family Association is a family association that conducts primary genealogical research and preserves genealogical and other historical information on the Pratt family surname, especially the descendants of Mormon Pioneer Orson Pratt or of his brothers. The association takes its name from its founder, Orson Pratt's, father, Jared Pratt.
Orson Pratt was an apostle in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a professor at University of Nauvoo in Illinois. After Orson trekked to what is now Utah, he served, among other offices, as the LDS Church Historian and Recorder 1874-1881 and also established the basis for the LDS Church's genealogical endeavors. Pratt had begun in the early-1850s an extensive work on the descendants and family of William Pratt, the earliest ancestor of the Pratts to come to what is now the United States, in cooperation with Frederick W. Chapman, a Congregationalist minister. Chapman's book was published in 1864, and Orson Pratt and his family members used it to perform temple work on many family members, continuing the focus and leading to them organizing the family association 17 years later.
The association was chartered by its founder, Orson Pratt "to collect and register therein, from generation to generation, the dates of births, marriages, places of residence and deaths of all the descendants of my four brothers and myself.... It is to be hoped that all our posterity of whatever branch or name will be sufficiently interested to preserve their genealogy to the latest generation."
The association's president is Robert Grow, Ph.D. and one of the association's historians is Robert Grow's son, University of Southern Indiana professor Matthew Grow, now with the Joseph Smith Papers Project. According to the association, as of 2011 it possessed a computer database with 32,000 descendants of Jared Pratt and Charity Dickinson, believed to be half-complete. The association has published a newsletter since 1965.