November 25, 2015 By Jan Mayer
I didn’t expect to be thankful for an “online” error, but sometimes it ends well. This mistake has endeared an ancestor to me forever.
I found a problem when I opened the FamilySearch “hints” that were supposed to connect me to long-lost family members. As I perused them, I found that someone had changed my Hawkins line, which had been recorded by the actual persons over 160 years earlier.
At first I was annoyed—what right did someone have to change this line?
I didn’t expect to be thankful for an “online” error, but sometimes it ends well. This mistake has endeared an ancestor to me forever.
I found a problem when I opened the FamilySearch “hints” that were supposed to connect me to long-lost family members. As I perused them, I found that someone had changed my Hawkins line, which had been recorded by the actual persons over 160 years earlier.
At first I was annoyed—what right did someone have to change this line?
I had to spend hours documenting that the hints were wrong–that Elizabeth Hawkins was very much English and we not born and bred in the southern United States as the recent changes had reflected. But the more I searched, the more my irritation turned to appreciation that so many records were right at my fingertips. I began to admire and then love this woman that I’d only heard referred to as “poor little Elizabeth.”
As the history of my great-great grandmother, Elizabeth Hawkins, unfolded, I discovered a strong and determined young woman. Her mother died when she was 17, leaving Elizabeth in charge of her 6 younger siblings until her father remarried. Around the same time, Elizabeth joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. At 21, just after her father died, she left her London home on her own to find other LDS church members in Liverpool who were going to Zion.
After a tumultuous ten-week voyage on the ship, Kennebec, she arrived in New Orleans and continued her journey up the Mississippi River with around 100 immigrants. In St. Louis, they boarded a steamboat, the Saluda, which was chartered by a church representative from Salt Lake City to take them to Council Bluffs, Iowa.
The muddy Missouri River was icy and running high, slowing the old steamboat down. They docked in Lexington, Missouri for supplies before heading through a dangerous, narrow channel with very strong currents. As they attempted to leave the next day, the paddle wheels were damaged and they had to return for repairs. Frustrated by the delay, the captain was determined to clear the bend in the river when the left early the next day and was reported to vow that they would “round the bend or blow this boat to hell.”
As the history of my great-great grandmother, Elizabeth Hawkins, unfolded, I discovered a strong and determined young woman. Her mother died when she was 17, leaving Elizabeth in charge of her 6 younger siblings until her father remarried. Around the same time, Elizabeth joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. At 21, just after her father died, she left her London home on her own to find other LDS church members in Liverpool who were going to Zion.
After a tumultuous ten-week voyage on the ship, Kennebec, she arrived in New Orleans and continued her journey up the Mississippi River with around 100 immigrants. In St. Louis, they boarded a steamboat, the Saluda, which was chartered by a church representative from Salt Lake City to take them to Council Bluffs, Iowa.
The muddy Missouri River was icy and running high, slowing the old steamboat down. They docked in Lexington, Missouri for supplies before heading through a dangerous, narrow channel with very strong currents. As they attempted to leave the next day, the paddle wheels were damaged and they had to return for repairs. Frustrated by the delay, the captain was determined to clear the bend in the river when the left early the next day and was reported to vow that they would “round the bend or blow this boat to hell.”
On that fatal morning–Good Friday, April 9, 1852– the captain demanded an increase in steam pressure to the dry boilers. Red hot, they exploded, blowing timber, chimneys, baggage, passengers and crew into the air. The intense blast was heard as far as two miles away and had such force that it hurled a 600 pound safe onto a high river bank.
Residents of Lexington instantly rushed to help, rescuing those in the water and stranded on the sinking boat or gathering the injured and dead. Between 75-135 people died and many others were severely injured; the bodies of some were never found.
Somehow Elizabeth survived.
Oh, how I wish she had kept a journal!
I couldn’t find whether or not she was injured, how she got to Salt Lake City or why she was married by the next year. She became the second wife of Walter Eli Wilcox, but it was a difficult marriage. He married three other women after her, and according to my great grandfather, John, abandoned her to raise six children on her own. With scant resources her young sons helped their family survive, but they deeply resented their father.
Though it took many years, Elizabeth once again made a bold move when she divorced Walter in 1889 and had her sealing canceled. She and all of her children were then sealed to Hyrum Smith, with his son, Joseph F. Smith proxy for the sealing. On her headstone in the Salt Lake City Cemetery, her name reads Elizabeth H.W. Smith.
Residents of Lexington instantly rushed to help, rescuing those in the water and stranded on the sinking boat or gathering the injured and dead. Between 75-135 people died and many others were severely injured; the bodies of some were never found.
Somehow Elizabeth survived.
Oh, how I wish she had kept a journal!
I couldn’t find whether or not she was injured, how she got to Salt Lake City or why she was married by the next year. She became the second wife of Walter Eli Wilcox, but it was a difficult marriage. He married three other women after her, and according to my great grandfather, John, abandoned her to raise six children on her own. With scant resources her young sons helped their family survive, but they deeply resented their father.
Though it took many years, Elizabeth once again made a bold move when she divorced Walter in 1889 and had her sealing canceled. She and all of her children were then sealed to Hyrum Smith, with his son, Joseph F. Smith proxy for the sealing. On her headstone in the Salt Lake City Cemetery, her name reads Elizabeth H.W. Smith.
