A commemoration and reenactment of a pivotal encounter between Ogden’s party and American fur trappers led by Johnson Gardner will take place Saturday at the Deserters Point monument. The event is one of a handful of activities this week organized by the Ogden Valley Bicentennial — or OV 200 — committee.

The committee has spent nearly a decade compiling Ogden’s history and planning the bicentennial celebration. One of its key projects has involved identifying and contacting Ogden’s descendants for inclusion in a descendant registry.

“When we were formulating a plan and ideas of things that would be interesting for this bicentennial, the question was raised, are there descendants out there? Could we find them? Could we make contact with them?” OV 200 Chairman Dave Martin told the Standard-Examiner. “From there on, a bunch of other questions started spinning out from that. If we did find them, would they be familiar with their ancestors’ contribution to our local history? Did they still meet in extended family groups? Were they aware of their own heritage?

“With that in mind, we just started getting out online and Googling whatever we could find on Peter Skene Ogden.”

According to Martin, the group — consisting largely of local historians and hobbyists and assisted early on by members of the Weber County Heritage Foundation — began its search by poring through genealogies, historical records and using online resources like FamilySearch and Ancestry.com. However, those efforts could only get them so far, as the records dealt largely with deceased individuals.

In the end, it was information provided by a pair of Oregon sisters, Roxanne and Sandra Woodruff — themselves descendants of Ogden’s clerk and second-in-command, William Kittson — and word of mouth that allowed the project to soar.

“We had been researching our family tree on my mom’s side for quite a long time,” Sandra Woodruff told the Standard-Examiner. “My mother was Rosa Ann Kittson Woodruff, and back in the early 1950s, she started researching the family tree because she was trying to determine the amount of Native American blood we had.”

Through those efforts, and research they’d done on behalf of a group of descendants of people who had lived and worked at Fort Nisqually — a Hudson’s Bay outpost established in the 1830s — the Woodruff sisters had amassed a treasure trove of information, which helped lead to the bicentennial group’s 2019 identification of Mark Perkins as an Ogden descendant and the first name entered into its registry.

“(Martin) had found that (Roxanne Woodruff) was president, and so he got in touch with some of the people up there,” Woodruff said. “It was a long, roundabout way, but all of us are just so interested in the history and everything. We were doing a lot of research on William Kittson because he was our ancestor … There’s just so many different connections. But, over the years, each one of us would pick up a little bit of information, and then we’d get it all together and everything. … We started writing back and forth.”

For his part, Perkins — a resident of British Columbia — had only become aware of his connection to Ogden, his three-times great grandfather, later in life.

“My wife and I both graduated from Lewis-Clark State College in Lewiston, Idaho and part of our Bachelor of Science degrees required a course in some type of American history,” Perkins told the Standard-Examiner. “We chose Northwest history and we were actually studying our own ancestors and didn’t even know it. We never really actually found out until we’d retired from our jobs at about 60 years old and then we started doing our research.”

Upon their first contact with Martin, he and his wife, Fern, decided they didn’t want to wait until the bicentennial and made the trek down to the Beehive State shortly thereafter. The couple was happy to celebrate their connection to Ogden.

Brian Ogden, also of British Columbia, is similarly proud of his connection to Ogden, as well as his indigenous and Métis roots through Ogden’s Native wife, and is thankful of the OV 200 group’s continued efforts to update the descendant registry.

“We are proud of our heritage and grateful for all the organizers that have kept the history alive in Ogden Valley and the city of Ogden,” Ogden wrote in an email to the Standard-Examiner.

According to Martin, nearly 400 descendants have been added to the registry over the years. Those descendants — some of whom are in Utah this week for the bicentennial celebration — are given the opportunity to receive certificates recognizing their lineage.

“I think it’s wonderful,” Perkins said of the registry and OV 200’s efforts. “(Ogden) was instrumental in the fur trade in the Northwest and with the Hudson’s Bay Company. And for you people down there just to latch on to this guy and celebrate his accomplishments is amazing to me.”