Jared Cook

Jared Cook hails from Rochester, New York, “the cradle of the restoration.” Jared likes to call this place “the Lord’s first choice” when talking with people who refer to Utah as “Zion.” It was largely from living here, and from having parents who were invested in church history, that he gained his fascination/obsession with all things having to do with mormon history. He was born in Ogden, but his parents moved to Rochester when he was a young boy. He served a mission, speaking spanish, in Phoenix, in the early 2000s, and somehow got a degree out of BYU in 2006 by reading old books and poems and writing about them, and then went to law school in Minneapolis where he and his wife (who is a far better spouse than he deserves) gained a deep and abiding love for the upper midwest. He moved back to Rochester after that, in 2009, and now lives in the ward that has within its boundaries the land where his paternal ancestor, Heber Kimball, lived when he and his friend Brigham joined the mormonites back in 1832. His mom’s ancestors joined in Nauvoo. He and his longsuffering wife, Catherine, have three rambunctious, beautiful children, an eldest daughter, and two young sons. He works as a lawyer to pay the bills and in his spare time he works on learning the arts of plumbing, electrical work, tiling, carpentry, painting, cooking, and bike mechanics. He enjoys riding bicycles, loves excessively long car trips completed in excessively short time periods (probably the result of the childhood trauma of driving from Rochester to Utah ever few summers to visit the ancestral lands), and once in a while he gets to indulge in his true outdoor passions: backpacking, skiing, and winter mountaineering.

See Jared’s posts here.