From a birthday tribute found on familysearch.org:
David (Dave) is the firstborn child of Sixtus Ellis Johnson and Mary Stratton. His father was a colonizer in Utah, Arizona, and Mexico which gave Dave an interesting life. His father moved the family from Virgin to a new settlement named Johnson, east of Kanab, Utah. From there they moved to Concho, Arizona and then into northern Mexico where they helped in laying out the town of Colonia Juarez by the time Dave was seventeen.
Dave made several trips back to Arizona for his father, to get the rest of the family and to settle business affairs. On one of those trips he met Rosetta Thurston and she became his wife in 1891. They became parents to three girls: Mary Amy, Mildred, and Rosetta. Unfortunately his wife, Rosetta, died in 1897 and the Mildred died later that year.
Dave's sister, Annie, took care of his girls until he married Alice Walser on November 27, 1902. They became parents to nine children: David Ellis Jr., Camilla, Anthony Wayne, Cora, Leroy, Alice, Ada, Fay Laney, and Verl.
While his family was growing Dave farmed and did odd jobs. For eleven years he carried the mail from the railroad terminal to Colonia Juarez as well as passengers. In 1912, because of the Mexican revolution, Dave evacuated his family out of Mexico with the rest of the Saints. As soon as they could they moved back in. The rebels were still roaming the country and gave his family a scare from time to time.
When baby, Verl, was six months old, Alice suddenly died (March 1918). Dave had eight motherless children with the oldest barely fourteen. For the rest of their upbringing Dave was both father and mother to his children seeing them educated and married well.
In 1956 Dave went on a historic train out of Salt Lake City to see the Palmyra Pageant in New York and other historic LDS Church sites. The following year he took a trip to Hawaii visiting the place where his father was a missionary in the 1850s.