Nina, the letter I mention is:

Charmaine A. Burdell, “A Young Girl’s Memory of Nauvoo: 1846-1847,” Nauvoo Journal, Spring 1995, 35-37.

It is a letter by Mary Elizabeth Worth Peoples, telling her memories of the the death of her parents and the last days of Mormon life in Nauvoo. It’s a couple of pages long. If you don’t have a copy, drop me a note at amyancestorfiles at gmail dot com and I’ll send you a pdf.

thanks,
Nina

To address Mark B.’s question about why this temple work was done: at her trial Charlotte Corday said, “I killed one man to save 100,000.” She took Marat’s life and gave her own to save France. It didn’t work, but she tried! She was a very quixotic character. And perhaps there are other reasons as well. I don’t know.

Thanks, all, for your comments, and Ardis for your particularly kind comment. This project really is about the love of the subject and the people — it’s certainly not done for fame or fortune!! And one of the very best parts of the project is the people I meet and interact with along the way.

Mark B., My 2nd great-grandmother left her husband in England and came to Utah with a son and daughter, where they lived with another daughter and her husband. A few years later, she married a man in a neighboring town and lived with him until his death. There was no divorce from her husband in England. Like you, I wonder if there was a lot of this going on.

And all those marriages: did anybody bother with divorce back then? Or did they simply walk away, head out into the frontier, and marry again when they found a suitable mate? (There may have been a lot more bigamy (both polyandry and polygyny) going on than we know–restrictive divorce laws might have helped drive the numbers up.)

But all of that is secondary to the big question: Why Charlotte Corday?? How many other assassins were included among the Eminent Women? Was she viewed as a modern-day (and female) Nephi to Marat’s Laban? What was Wilford Woodruff thinking? (Who’s got his journal, and what did he say about this?)

Amy is researching these women using the same kinds of records, the same meticulous attention to detail, that she would if she were researching the life of one of her own great-grandmothers — only she starts without having the clues that we have about our great-grandmothers (a general idea of where they came from, through family tradition; the fact that they had a child who became our grandparent; maybe access to family pictures or family writings). Those of you who have identified new ancestors, or who have dug out the stories of their lives through your own research, have some idea of the work she’s done — only few of us have done that for women who are unrelated to us.

And she makes it look easy by presenting it to us in a nice package, all organized and coherent, with pictures. And she’ll be doing it over and over again, with other women — some of them famous in our culture, perhaps, but some of them so unknown that her tributes here may be the only life history these faithful women ever have.

Three cheers! This is a labor of love — and I cheer for both the labor and the love. Thanks, Amy.

Sometime between 1850 and 1860, Anna and William separated. In the 1850 census, he is living with her on one side of the Mississippi River, and in the 1860 census, he is living with a woman named Mary in Linn County, not far from Anna’s brother Emanuel Eldridge. William and Mary have several of William and Anna’s children living with them and some children that could be either Anna’s or Mary’s — the Missouri birth records are not good enough to tell which of the younger children belong to which wife.

There are a lot of people to keep track of in this life story, but tracking down all of her siblings and children, as much as was possible, is what allowed me to trace her story.

And the research process was so interesting — I found myself last week rather unexpectedly discussing HIPAA regulations with the lady in charge of records at the Utah State Hospital (formerly the Insane Asylum). I can’t request Anna’s records. Evidently one of her direct descendants could, if he or she could prove the line of descent from her with legal documents.

Why is there not some sort of time limit for medical records privacy laws like there is for the census?