Bethany J. Wiggins
I, Bethany
Jane Wiggins, was born on November 25, 1992.
I was born in Monroe, North Carolina to Hugh Darrell Wiggins and Janie
Lea Lespier Wiggins. My mother is one
quarter Puerto Rican and was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. My father is predominantly Caucasian with
some Native American blood and was born in Robbinsville, North Carolina. My grandparents from my mother are Wilma Lea
Brown Rose of Robbinsville North Carolina and Jamie Lespier of Ponce Puerto
Rico. My father’s parents are William
Ray Wiggins and Dennis Mae Massey Wiggins, both of Robbinsville, North
Carolina.
My mother was a convert to the Mormon Church
and joined when she was sixteen while living in Denmark. Keith Christensen who is from Idaho baptized
her. When she was eighteen she moved
back to the United States and decided to live in Robbinsville and finish high school
there. She met my father and they soon
married later that year in 1970. My
father was not a member but he was converted and they married in the temple in
1987. Their marriage marked the
beginning of our large family with the first child being born in 1971 and the
last being born in 1994.
I was born
the eleventh of twelve children. My ten
older siblings are Darrell Lee Wiggins, Vanessa Faith Wiggins, Melinda Eve
Wiggins, Jamie Raphael Wiggins, Michael Shane Wiggins, Hugh Jared Wiggins,
Carmen Marie Wiggins, Robert Lon Wiggins, Rebecca Elizabeth Wiggins, and Ariel
Michelle Wiggins and I have one younger brother, Benjamin Tyler Wiggins. I have four aunts and six uncles. My aunts are Elodie Hebert Madewell, Nancy
Rogers Phillips, Connie Wiggins Millsaps, and Lydia Rogers. My uncles are Donald Gene Ledbetter, Jamie
Lespier, Daniel Hebert, and Lester Lespier.
My mother chose my name in a rather
different way. Since I was her eleventh
child she was having difficulty thinking of an original name that she
liked. She couldn’t decide and the nurse
in the hospital suggested Bethany. My
mom thought of a little girl she use to baby-sit named Beth and she immediately
fell in love with the name. I was given
my middle name, Jane, from a shortened version of my mother’s name Janie.
Overtime I eventually began to go by Beth to avoid confusion with my soon to be
future sister-n-law who would have the same exact name as me.
My family
lived in Monroe, North Carolina until I was seven months old. In the summer of 1993 my family moved to the
town of Robbinsville, which is Graham Country.
We moved for my father’s new job and so we could be closer to
family. We lived by a creek in a huge
rock house with a horseshoe driveway at 1520 Tallulah RD. Ted Phillips, CEO of Phillips&Jordan
Construction Company, owned our home. My
father was currently working in Asheville at a truck company called Con-way
Southern Express (CSE). My mother
commuted to Western Carolina University in Cullowhee so she could earn her
teaching degree.
When I was
about three or four years old I began going to the local daycare center with my
brother Benjamin and my sister Ariel since our parents were either working or
in school and our older siblings were also in school. We loved going to daycare since our mamaw
Dennis Mae worked there. Ariel and I are
only a year and a half apart so we attended the daycare together for most of
our toddler years. In the fall of 1998 I
started kindergarten at Robbinsville Elementary School, which was the building
of the old high school that my father attended.
My teachers were Mrs. Waldroup and Mrs. Stewart. Ariel walked me to my first day of school
since we rode the school bus because our parents weren’t home in the morning.
Kindergarten
was such a fun time for me. I was in the
same class as my best friend Callie Bush, whom I previously attended daycare
with. She would come to my house to play or spend the night all of the
time. I soon made friends with Jessica
Millsaps, Chelsey Cable, Katie Wilson, and Blake Godfrey. These girls were all of my best friends and
we soon made a new friend. Tacey
Trammell moved to Robbinsville before Christmas and I was her first and only
friend for some time. She had trouble
remembering my name so she always called me Little Wiggins. I would grow up to remain very good friends
with Tacey and Chelsey.
During Kindergarten
my mother was completing her student teaching and graduated in December of 1998
with a teaching degree valid for grades K-12.
Our whole family attended her graduation at Western Carolina University and
we celebrated with a huge party at Fontana Village Resort. This particular resort is located within our
city limits and is near to the border of Tennessee. Many of my older siblings worked in various
departments at this Resort and my mother even did before graduating
college.
I met my grandpa, Jamie Lespier, from Puerto
Rico for the first time at my mother’s college graduation. We didn’t get to see him often since he does
not live in the country. My papaw,
William Ray Wiggins, died from cancer when I was in the first grade. This was my dad’s dad and it was very
upsetting for our family. Papaw Ray
served during WWII and was a very strong person that the younger grandchildren
looked up to a lot. We do not have very
many memories of him but the ones we do have are of us playing in his yard
surrounded by the white picket fence, getting candy from the store, and riding
around in his old pickup truck.
I continued
though grade school at Robbinsville. In
first grade my teachers were Mrs. Moody and Mrs. Garland, second grade was Mrs.
Hooper and Mrs. Haney, third grade was Mrs. Norcross and Mrs. Snyder, fourth
grade was Mrs. Roach and Mrs. Trost, fifth grade was Mrs. Styles and Mrs.
Hooper, and in sixth grade I had Mrs. Burchfield for homeroom. I began basketball, t-ball, and clogging in
the first grade along with siblings Rebecca, Ariel, and Benjamin. I started playing the fiddle in the third
grade and the trumpet in the sixth grade.
I played
basketball and t-ball, or softball, all throughout elementary school. Basketball was my favorite sport and I even
had a basketball court at my house. I
started my fiddle lessons with Bill Millsaps at Stecoah afterschool
center. Stecoah was a part of Graham
County and there was an old school there where we had the afterschool
program. With this program I received
free fiddle, clogging, and voice instruction.
Ariel, Benjamin, and Rebecca all
attended playing instruments and taking clogging lessons. We all took piano
lessons as well but they did not continue through our older years as we became
more involved with sports and high school band.
Rebecca did continue on in piano and became a very good pianist.
Along side
of these extra curricular activities I loved the outdoors. My siblings and I would always play outside
since we had a creek by our house and a huge backyard. We would catch crawdads
in the creek, make slip-n-slide’s in the yard, jump on the trampoline, ride our
bikes around the driveway, or go hiking in the woods. My family always went camping and to the lake
with my mother’s sister Nancy. My
cousins Hunter, Autumn, Rena, Josh, Sullivan, and Keenan would always come
visit with us. We would camp at
Santeetlah Lake in Robbinsville and Nancy would bring her camper and pontoon
boat.
During my
early years of childhood we had a lot of family events take place. When I was four I had three siblings get
married in one year. We had weddings in
June, September, and December and I was a flower girl in all three of
them. Darrell married Tammy Morris,
Vanessa married Russell Morehead, and Jamie married Bethany Pinnell. Darrell and Tammy had their first child in February
of 1998. I became an aunt to Darrell Lee
Wiggins II when I was five years old.
While living
in Robbinsville we continued to attend the LDS church. Robbinsville is a very small town of no more
than 7000 people and it is right in the middle of the Bible Belt. The nearest LDS church was in the town of Murphy,
which was about an hour away. We drove
to church there each Sunday and then on Wednesdays for activities. My dad baptized me in the Murphy Branch when
I was eight years old. He baptized each
of the twelve children and five of those were done at the Murphy Branch. My Branch President was Brother Montgomery
and then after Brother Booth. Our branch
was so small that the older men had to serve the sacrament because we had no
young men. The building was too small
for our congregation so it was eventually expanded.
