George Lawrence Tate, the third of thirteen children to Elizabeth De La Mare and John William Tate, was born on 30 May 1881, in Utah's Tooele Valley,  just over the Oquirrh Mountains from Salt Lake City.

February 1906: At 24 years of age, Tate was called to serve a mission to the Southern States. He was assigned to labor in the Florida Conference, which then encompassed all of Florida, South Georgia, and parts of Southeast Alabama. By this time, he had been married for almost four years to his longtime sweetheart, Minerva Richards, and the couple had a daughter, Thelma. Uprooting all normalcy by embarking on a mission to the Church's most dangerous field of labor illustrated both the Church's high expectations and enormous demands of its members, as well as proving George Tate's unwavering commitment to his faith by his readiness to answer the call. He made arrangements with his father to accommodate Minerva and baby Thelma during the three years he was to spend in the South. By March of that year, he had left his family in Tooele and made the journey across the nation to Jacksonville, Florida. From here, he would travel throughout the Florida Conference, but seems to have spent most of his mission years in the southern counties of Georgia, which had become one of the conference's most active and enthusiastic areas of membership. His contributions were many, and in various places, but his presence became particularly important to the Mormons in and around Douglas, in Coffee County. Elder Tate's time among the Satilla River Saints was brief; the effects of his influence were not. 

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