Betty Jo (Beck) Ivie's Obituary
Betty Jo (Beck) Ivie was born February 26, 1930 in Paris, Idaho to Frederick Beck and Ethel Porter Beck, the eighth of ten children (Loal, Worthy, Ardith, Hope, Marva, Garth, Gayle, Berlavee and Helen). She grew up on a farm in Lanark, Idaho, and had fond memories of doing chores with her older sisters and going to school where her oldest sister Loal was a teacher. The family joked that she was so small in stature because they “ran out of genes,” but she was always a fierce and vibrant personality, with a lot of opinions that she offered freely.
She loved music all her life and learned to play the piano well enough that at age fourteen she was called to be the ward organist. Later she attended BYU with the help of some money from her sisters and eventually earned a Master’s Degree in German after serving an LDS mission in Germany (1954-56). She married Evan Leon Ivie on March 29, 1957 in the Logan, Utah temple. They had eleven children (Dynette, Mark, Joseph, Robert, Ann, Rebecca, John, James, Mette, Emily and Peter) and did genealogy in their Family Home Evenings so often they were featured in the local newspapers. The children’s academic progress was very important to Betty Jo, and she loved to see them win awards and scholarships.
Betty Jo and Evan lived in Washington DC, Watertown/Boston, New Jersey, Provo, Utah and Nauvoo, among other places. She was well known in all those places for baking tasty loaves of bread, which she handed out to neighbors and friends. She was a voracious reader and regularly took her kids to the library. Later she loved walking around the neighborhood (or pulling a sled) with her 47 grandchildren and was instrumental in helping raise many of them. She left behind many detailed journals of her life. If you ever got a detail wrong, she would get out a journal, an old photograph, or a newspaper clipping she’d saved and prove it.
In 1992, Evan went to Ukraine for a Fullbright scholarship. Betty Jo and Peter went with him. After his heart attack, she learned to do vegan cooking for him, though she kept her sweet tooth and you can probably still find stashes of chocolate distributed throughout her apartment which she kept in hiding for herself.
In 2000-01, Betty Jo and Evan served an LDS mission in Germany and Eastern Europe. They went on numerous trips to 23 of the 37 countries they had stewardship over and met many lifelong friends. In 2002 they moved to Nauvoo where Evan headed the BYU Study Abroad center. They remained in Nauvoo for 15 years. After Evan suffered an aortic aneurysm and a stroke, they moved to Cove Point in Provo to be closer to family. Evan passed away March 2 of 2020.
Betty Jo stayed at Cove Point, where she hosted a weekly movie night featuring her classic favorites, including Shirley Temple and Cary Grant, among others. She loved reading and playing the piano and always little babies, now great-grandchildren. She also continued doing genealogy indexing for the LDS church, with over one hundred thousand names and she scorned the idea that AI could ever do better than she did at scrutinizing difficult handwriting. For a long time, she was an amazing “Energizer Bunny” as her children sometimes called her. But in December of 2025, Betty Jo predicted to everyone who visited that it was her last Christmas, and she was right as she often was about such things. She passed away December 30, 2025, from a lung infection at the age of 95. We will miss her enormously.
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