While working on older birth certificates, I happened to notice an unusual residence of both parents in one from 1923: “Kambove Katanga Kongo Belgian Africa.” Normally, I’d expect parents to reside in the same place as the birth of the child. However, Mack Donald Sullivan, the son of Eugene and Lora Sullivan, was born in Salt Lake City on August 23, 1923 to parents with a distinctly foreign home address. Little did I know the extent of connections that historically existed between such distant locales.

The Sullivan family first arrived in Utah in 1910, soon after Eugene and his first wife Bridget were married in Michigan, where they were both born. They had two sons, in 1910 and 1913, in Utah’s Bingham Canyon, the city adjacent to the open-pit mining site. After Bridget died in 1918 of the Spanish Flu, Eugene married Lora McDonald in Salt Lake City. The newly blended family with his young sons appears together in the 1920 census in the Bingham Canyon area.

Only a few weeks after the census, Eugene was applying for a passport, stating that he was about to take a position as a mining superintendent in “Union of South Africa, Rhodesia, and Belgian Congo.” The Belgian Congo in Africa was right on the verge of a rapid mining development in the Congo basin, with the Kambove copper mines being one of the first and largest. With Bingham being the largest copper mine in the world at this time, it’s not surprising that the new area might tap into the experience of a Utah mining foreman (many of the engineers and managers were Belgian colonists, or otherwise white).

The community sent the family off in style with a 200-person banquet and dancing in the Odd Fellows Hall (Salt Lake Tribune, February 29, 1920). Steamships and other travel infrastructure enabled mining to become a truly global endeavor in the twentieth century.

Mack’s youngest brother was born in 1925 in Kambove, continuing the Sullivan life in the Congo. The three youngest children returned alone, first in 1939 on their way to boarding school in England, and then back to Utah to stay with relatives a few months later with the looming war in Europe (Deseret News, January 30, 1940).

Eugene died of illness in April 1940 while en route from the Gold Coast of Africa with his wife Lora. Remembered in an obituary as well-known in mining circles in Utah, he’s buried in Nova Scotia, Canada. The surviving family returned to Salt Lake full time, with several sons having followed in their father’s career with employers like the Utah Copper Company (later Kennecott) in Bingham.

In one family’s journey around the globe, and a single birth certificate, we glimpse Utah’s place in broader world history. 

Bingham Canyon Railroads author Don Strack contributed research to this post.