Jemima Brown Rogers Updated Again

Several years ago I wrote about looking for my husband’s great-great grandmother Jemima Brown. We found several more interesting things about her since that time, and just last week my husband’s sister found a tintype in their grandmother’s papers that we think is Jemima before she went to Utah. My husband’s grandmother is one of Jemima’s granddaughters, named Emily Elizabeth Brown.

We thought we were going to find lots of things when we visited Bath, England, in the summer of 2012, but our search of area records in the Guildhall in Bath did not yield anything we didn’t already know. We have searched microfilms, we have searched on Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org, as well as Google maps. I’ll show you what we found as I recap Jemima’s life, but we are still left with some questions.

         Jemima’s christening record of April 24, 1803

Born 13 April 1803 in Erlestoke in Wiltshire, not far from Stonehenge, Jemima was the eldest child of Thomas and Jane Brown. She was christened 24 April 1803, as shown in the record here. Two younger brothers were born in 1805 and 1808, and then Thomas died when Jemima was still a little girl. Jemima’s mother, Jane, had two more sons out of wedlock and was probably struggling to make ends meet and keep her children fed. Then, when Jemima was 20, Jane married a second time. The marriage did not last—Jane kicked him out and resumed her first married name. She died two years later.

Thomas Brown christening record

Jemima, meanwhile, bore a son nine months after her mother’s second marriage, on December 27, 1824. She moved from the village to the nearby “big city” of Bath to have the baby, and then she took him home two months later to be christened Thomas Brown. Here is his christening record. Note that Jemima is a “spinster,” which specified at that time a woman who had never been married. People keep saying (perhaps starting with her grandson Nephi James Brown) that she had been married and had divorced her husband, but that is impossible considering the divorce laws of the time: only men could apply for divorce; divorce cost an enormous amount of money, far beyond what people in Jemima’s class could ever hope to pay, and it required a private Act of Parliament to get it finalized (essentially it was for extremely wealthy men of the nobility and aristocracy only); and a woman lost the legal right to keep her children if she were divorced. Jemima moved back to Bath where she seems to have been employed as a seamstress. Remember in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol how Bob Cratchit’s daughter Martha was home late for Christmas because she was working as a seamstress and they had to get the work done before they could go? It was a hard job, with very, very long hours, bad light, and little pay. If that were her job, Jemima worked extremely hard to be successful.

Jemima married when her boy Thomas was nine years old. She was living in the northern part of Bath, in the Walcot parish, and she married a carpenter named Francis Baker Rogers, who also lived in the same parish, on 2 June 1834. Here is their marriage record.

Jemima Brown and Francis Baker Rogers

Jemima and Frank seemed to have been happy together, based on family tradition. Of course, in this family some incorrect tradition was also passed down, but Jemima herself made sure to have Frank’s records added to hers after she arrived in Utah, to show that they were spouses. That argues for her having been happy with him.

1841 Census: Frank, Jemima, Thomas, and Eliz. Nash

Jemima and Frank had her son Thomas apprenticed to a cabinet maker. In 1841 they had a young woman living with them in Bath, besides Thomas. Notice that Thomas’s last name is given in the census as Browning and that his profession is Chair m—short for chair maker. The young woman listed below Thomas is 20-year-old Elizabeth Nash. Her surname was common in Jemima’s home village of Erlestoke, so perhaps she had arranged to live with somebody her family knew. You have to remember this name ten years later. (One item to explain about the 1841 Census: for some reason the officials decided to round down all the ages of people over 15 to the nearest multiple of 5, so if you were between 15 and 19, you were 15 on the census. This explains why both Jemima and Frank are 35 when actually Jemima would have been 37 or 38. Thomas is 15 instead of 16 or 17.)

They lived on Church Street, a very short street perpendicular to the great Bath Abbey on its south side. We have photographs of it from Google maps street view.


Looking in at Church Street from either end. (I said it was a short street.) On the left you're standing in the square across which is Bath Abbey. This is probably the end of the street where they lived.

Thomas grew up and completed his apprenticeship to become a cabinet maker. We know he joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on 21 April 1844 in Bath; he was 19 years old. The next autumn, Jemima and Frank also joined the Church. Jemima was baptized on 19 November 1844, and Frank was probably baptized the same day, but the records have become unclear (the online record shows he was baptized during his lifetime, but there is no date shown).

The young woman living with Jemima and Frank in 1841 was probably the one said by Jemima’s grandson Nephi James Brown to be the servant girl who got into trouble and gave her baby to Jemima and Frank to raise. In 1851 the census shows Jemima and Frank living in James Street, in the north part of Bath in the parish of Walcot where they were married. With them was a little girl named Elizabeth Naish, listed as a visitor. Lizzie wasn’t so much a visitor as a permanent fixture—she and Jemima would be together for over thirty more years. Lizzie had been born in September 1847, and the tintype we found shows her as a child of between 1 and 2 years of age, on Jemima’s lap. The image must have been made in 1848 or 1849 in Bath.

Jemima Brown Rogers and Lizzie Nash Rogers
about 1849

Frank, Jemima, and little Lizzie on the 1851 Census

From Google Maps images, this is the place on James Street
where the building they lived in must have stood in 1851.

Sadly for Jemima, Frank died 8 June 1854. Her son Thomas was probably already making plans to go to Utah, and perhaps she and Frank had been planning to go too. She decided she and Lizzie would go as soon as possible anyway. Thomas left in the late fall of 1854 aboard the Clara Wheeler. He ended up in St. Louis, working as a cabinet maker and sending money for his mother and adopted little sister to join him. He went with a wagon train across the Great Plains in the spring and summer of 1856, arriving in Salt Lake City in September.

During the same time, Jemima and Lizzie left England in the spring of 1856 aboard the Thornton. This record is the ship’s manifest, made upon their arrival in New York. Arriving in Iowa late in the season, they had to wait for handcarts to be built before their company could leave on its arduous journey, and those handcarts didn’t hold up well during the journey, delaying them again and again. They walked the thousands of miles across the Great Plains with the James G. Willie Company, and early in September the weather turned against their company and the ones after it. Frosts came, and then the frosts turned to severe blizzards in the middle of October. Their food ran out, and the delays proved fatal to many people. Jemima used all of their spare clothing to keep Lizzie warm, and she slept with the little girl on top of her to keep her out of the snow.

Jemima and Lizzie, winter 1857

Family members recounted that Jemima’s favorite expression was “Begad,” and during this journey, she told them, when the company was supposed to be singing “Come, Come Ye Saints,” with its chorus, “all is well, all is well,” she would sing under her breath, “Begad, all is bad!” Rescuers arrived in the nick of time, but they still had to slog through deep snow to a resting spot,  where they buried their dead and were fed and strengthened for a day. They still had to go on and get to Salt Lake City after that. With only a sunbonnet on her head, Jemima’s scalp froze, and all her hair eventually fell out, never to grow again. She wore lace caps the rest of her life.

This photograph was made probably within a few months of their arrival in Salt Lake City, judging by Lizzie's age. Jemima is so much more aged looking than she was in that tintype, taken about 8 years earlier, that the extreme hardship of the journey is apparent in what a toll it took on her health.

Jemima Brown Rogers in 1849 and 1857
(with Lizzie on the left)

In the same envelope with the tintype, we found a double negative for these two prints, the second of which was obviously taken the same time as the one above with young Lizzie. The contrast between the two images shows even more clearly how hard that journey must have been.

In Salt Lake City, Jemima and Lizzie lived with Thomas, who worked as a skilled carpenter and cabinet maker. In 1857 Thomas married a woman from a village near Erlestoke in England, Jane White. Jane’s brother, John, married a woman named Eliza Brown (no relation to Thomas) who came from the same group of villages. When John White died a number of years later, Thomas married Eliza Brown White, making her name Eliza Brown White Brown. This was a polygamous marriage for three years until Jane died. Thomas ended up with 19 children: his and Jane’s, Eliza’s and John’s, and his and Eliza’s. The youngest of his children was Nephi James Brown, who wrote about Jemima's life and made up, or passed along, a few traditions about her that have proven incorrect.

1860 U.S. Census, Salt Lake City

In Salt Lake City in 1860 the census taker found Jemima and Lizzie living in Thomas and Jane’s household, with the eldest of Jemima’s grandchildren, Louisa. Thomas was working for a cabinet maker in Salt Lake City and prospering in his profession. But his wife longed to move out of the city and join her brother and other kin in North Ogden, a farming community 40 miles or so to the north. In 1863 Jane prevailed upon Thomas to move to North Ogden. Jemima and Lizzie stayed in Salt Lake City. We do not know whether Jemima was working, whether Lizzie was working, or how exactly they supported themselves after Thomas and his family left.

The next year, in October 1864, 17-year-old Lizzie married James Sharp, a railroad man. The 1880 Census shows Jemima living with the Sharp family, which consisted of James and Lizzie and six of their children: Lizzie, Katie, Celia, Aggie, John, and Heber. On the day of the Census, little Celia had the measles. You have to wonder how difficult it was for Lizzie to do all the work of the household with that many small children—there was no maid living with them. With Jemima growing older and perhaps less able to do a lot of helpful work, Lizzie might have been feeling extremely pressured.

1880 U.S. Census, Salt Lake City

The Sharps had a family of ten children in all, and James became the Mayor of Salt Lake City in 1885. They were prosperous by then, living in a large house on Brigham Street (later called South Temple Street). At that time, Lizzie sent Jemima north to Thomas and his second wife, Eliza. Jemima never got over it. To her grandchildren she often recounted the blow, saying, “And then the beezum turned me out!” She blamed Lizzie for valuing the high life of important society more than her adoptive mother. It was a sad division.

Through a long life of incredible hardships, Jemima was strong-willed, courageous, determined to come out on top, and completely faithful to her chosen religion and to her family. She died 25 January 1890 in North Ogden and was buried in the Ben Lomond Cemetery in that community.

Jemima Brown Rogers gravestone
 (her birth year is wrong)