Frances Crosby Brown

1817 - 1895

I was born in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, Canada, 31 October 1817. My father, Joshua Crosby and my mother, Hannah Corning Cann, were natives of the same place, but moved to Portland, Chautaugua Co., New York, when I was but five years of age. Our home was on the beautiful shore of Lake Erie, where I spent my childhood and early life. Though bred to toil and privation incident to the settling of a new country, had many pleasant recreations. The gospel net of so-called Mormonism caught our family in 1838, and from that time commenced the realities and varieties of life, serious and earnest. The serious, when friends and relatives deserted us wholesale, the earnest, when in the spring of 1839 we left our home and journeyed west not knowing our destination.

"The Saints were then being put through intense persecution and were in a scattered condition. After a journey of seven weeks we came to Commerce, afterwards called Nauvoo, on the Mississippi River, where in a short time we were prostrated with sickness. There were not enough well ones to care for the sick and afflicted.

"8 July 1839, my mother died in her wagon, being the first Latter Day Saint to die there. My mother breathed her last at sunset and Sister Huntington (mother-in-law of Brigham Young) at sunrise the next morning. Both funeral sermons were preached at the same time by Sidney Rigdon, and they were laid side by side. Of our company from New York, seven were taken in as many months. O the sad, bitter and earnest realities of those days of anguish. How was it possible for humanity to attain strength to endure them.

"I was in Nauvoo through all the persecutions. I saw the Prophet and his brother Hyrum on their way to Carthage. I saw their mangled bodies after they were brought home. I saw the disaffection of Rigdon and others. I saw Brigham Young as the mantle of Joseph fell upon him. I was married there by the Prophet (Joseph) and received most of my blessings in the Nauvoo Temple. I left Nauvoo, 13 May 1846, stopped over one year at Winter Quarters, left there in the spring of 1847, and was sick the entire distance of 1,000 miles, so that I rode on my bed all the way to the Salt Lake Valley.

"We lived in the 7th Ward of Salt Lake City, removed to St. George in the fall of 1862.

"After the completion of the St. George Temple early in 1877, I was called by the President, Brigham Young to labor in the Temple, which I considered my home for seven years. During this time, I received all the blessings pertaining to the everlasting covenant and have done the entire work for my dead so far as I have found them. I have traced my father's and mother's families back four generations to the time of their first emigration from England and have been mainly instrumental in the baptisms and endowments etc., for more than six hundred of my relatives.

"I have had no particular manifestations by dream or visions, but as I have been seriously and earnestly engaged in this work, there has been an influence working with me and urging me forward in a way that I have been able to learn of my ancestry in a most marvelous manner and in such a way that I am forced to believe that the key is my mother.

"Removed to Nutrioso, Apache, Arizona, in October 1883, which is now my home."

Source:
Quoted from Samuel Wallace Crosby. Jesse Wentworth Crosby - Mormon Preacher, Pioneer, Man of God. 1977, p. 27. Described as "a brief biographical sketch prepared for the St. George, Utah Mormon Temple records, by Frances Crosby Brown some time prior to her death."