Joseph Alonzo Martindale (1876-1962) was in the cattle business and served a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Joseph Alonzo Martindale was born in Grantsville, Tooele, Utah on March 11, 1876, the twelfth of thirteen children born to William Clinton and Matilda Jane Mcmurray Martindale (Matilda was the first of William’s three wives). Five years later the family moved to Oakley, Utah, where William, who had been assigned to be the president of the Goose Creek Branch (Tooele Stake), became the co-owner of the Oakley Cooperative Mercantile. Joseph received his early education in a little schoolhouse built on an acre of land donated by his father. When he was sixteen, the family went into the business of shepherding, starting out with a flock given them by a Mr. Harrington, on condition of a tax of 10 lambs per hundred and two pounds of wool per sheep at shearing time.

(Joseph tells of life-threatening experiences with cattle drivers while grazing their flock of 6000 in Twin Falls Valley; also of a trip to Chicago with his father to sell a load of sheep, and the family reunion which took place when they traveled to the house where his father had been born).

By the time Joseph was abut 20, his father had become the first president of the Basin Branch in Oakley; it was here that he met Mary Bell, to whom his father married him in their Basin home on January 20, 1895. The couple moved to a one-room log house in Oakley; their first child, Clyde, was born November 18, 1895. They later moved to a larger house, where their first daughter, Ruby was born on June 12, 1897. Within the next few years, Joseph and his father tore down the house and rebuilt it in Basin. Here, their next two daughters, Emma (5 April 1900) and Freda (25 April 1902) were born, as well as twins sons named Joseph and Hyrum (18 January 1905), who unfortunately died within a half hour; and their mother followed them two days later.

Joseph, who had since also gone into the cattle business, sold his cattle and sheep, and his house, and left on an LDS mission to the Southern States in October 1906, though not before making a trip to the Salt Lake Temple to be sealed by proxy to Mary and their children. (Martindale tells of his setting apart as a missionary and explains how the promises given him in that blessing were fulfilled, on 5 separate occasions, while serving in Tennessee and South Carolina). Joseph returned from his mission January 1909, and was promptly called to the presidency of the Elder’s Quorum and the superintendency of the Stake MIA. Soon thereafter, he met Lucy Tinsley, whom he married in the Salt Lake Temple on June 3 of that year. Joseph’s daughters Ruby, Emma, and Freda came to live with the couple, who had settled on Main Street in Oakley, where their first child, Lyman, was born on March 6, 1910.

A year later, while Joseph was working for the Logan Knitting Co., his father died, and Joseph and his family moved back into the old home a few blocks away. It was here that three more children were born: Edwin Clinton, 26 August 1912, Joseph Raymond, 17 Sept. 1914, and Bethel, 18 July, 1916. A few years later, the Martindales bought their own home north of town, where their last two children, Roma (118 December 1919) and LuRae (4 April 1925) were born. During that time, Joseph was ordained a Seventy (May 1921).

(Joseph tells of the escapades of Henry Workman, co-permitee of the local stage coach line, who received twenty-five years in the Federal Penitentiary for his trouble).

After separating from his second family, in 1929, Joseph married Clara Tolman MacIntosh and moved to Boise, Idaho, where he worked as a guard in the Idaho State Penitentiary until his retirement in 1961, at the age of 85. By the time of his death in April 1962, Martindale had 9 living children, 51 grandchildren, and 86 great-grandchildren. He was buried beside his wife and babies in Basin, Utah.