William Sevey has been using ward minutes archived at the Church History Library. Sometimes a line or two from an account spurs him to look more carefully at a Latter-day Saint’s life, and he has agreed to share those stories with us from time to time or, in other cases, to turn over his research and let me write the story. This is one he has written himself.

It was a cold January day in the year 1910 when Bishop Alma Keyes stood at the meeting house pulpit of Uintah Ward to conduct a funeral.

Although never an easy thing, shepherding the grief of others was an assignment he knew well. Having served as bishop of the ward for over two decades, Bishop Keyes would have presided at the funerals of most ward members who died since 1889. Customarily he gave the closing eulogy, as did Mormon bishops everywhere.

This funeral was different.

Maria Stoddard had not lived in the ward for a decade. But no one had forgotten her. Her story was too strange to have been forgotten. Born in Pulham Market, Norfolk, England, in 1866, Laura Maria Farrow was the ninth of thirteen children born to Samuel and Emma Farrow. The Farrows had converted to the LDS church a few years before Laura Maria was born and, after emigrating to Utah in 1879, settled in Uintah, an Ogden suburb. Laura Maria’s older sister Mary Jane married Bishop Keyes’ son Lynn, linking the Keyes and the Farrows through marriage.

Laura Maria, who came to be known as Maria, married William Henry Stoddard in the summer of 1889. She and William made their home in Uintah not far from Maria’s parents.

Their first child, a daughter they named Rose, came a year later. Rose was at a delightful stage of life, approaching her second birthday, when she fell ill and died of spinal meningitis. It was the first of a series of tragedies to befall the family.

Maria and William had four more children in close succession: twins Laura Fern and William Vern, born the same month the Salt Lake Temple was dedicated, in April 1893; Wilford Earl, born in 1895; and Arnold Lorenzo, born in 1898. Nothing in the public record suggests anything amiss during this time. To the contrary, things seemed on the upswing. In May of 1899, Maria and William were sealed in the Salt Lake Temple, perhaps suggesting a deepening bond between the two. In other ways, Maria seemed like everyone else. In the fall of 1899, for example, she submitted a child’s apron she had sewn for display in an Ogden fair. Dozens of other women submitted their own handicraft for the event.

What happened next is explained by an entry written by a Uintah Ward clerk at the time of Maria Stoddard’s death. The ward minute book reads: “When the youngest [Arnold Lorenzo] was about two years old the young mother lost her reason and was placed in the mental hospital at Provo. She never recovered her reason sufficiently to take care of her family, but remained at the hospital till her death, which occurred three or four days prior to the funeral.”

In March 1900, an Ogden judge pronounced Maria Stoddard “insane” and committed her to the State Hospital in Provo. She was discharged six months later, in September, returning home to William and children, probably on trial to see if she was rehabilitated. That turned out not to be the case. After just a few days in Uintah she was recommitted to the hospital in Provo. She remained there for the next decade – which turns out to have been the rest of her life. The death certificate said she died of “paralysis and heart disease.” She was just 43.

One wonders how Mormons at the time understood the tragedy that befell this family. Did anyone blame Maria Stoddard for “losing her reason?” Mental illness was then not well understood, and blaming the victim was not necessarily something to be avoided as it would be in later generations. Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, marking the beginning of the psychotherapeutic profession, was published the same year Stoddard was committed. The mysteries of the unconscious were just beginning to be plumbed. Yet no one then or now could adequately explain what had happened to Maria Stoddard – what purpose was served in Providence permitting the sudden disintegration of a family in the prime of life.

The minutes of the funeral give no overarching theory, no grand design. They record Bishop Keyes’ eulogy in a single, spare line that betrays no attempt at explaining the mind of God: He spoke of “his long acquaintance with the parents of the deceased also of the splendid care that was taken of the deceased while at the mental hospital at Provo.”

Maria’s parents were still alive and likely would have attended the funeral. William Stoddard was not present. In 1905, he died of Bright’s disease, leaving his children effectively orphans. The clerk’s minute entry said that, after Mr. Stoddard’s death, the “four children were taken by kindly disposed relatives.”

After Bishop Keyes dismissed the meeting, Maria Stoddard’s remains were interred in the Uintah cemetery and the grave dedicated by Robert Gale, a counselor to Bishop Keyes in the bishopric of Uintah Ward.

Sources: Minutes, 8 January 1910, Uintah Ward, Weber Stake, Historical Record, 1888-1913, LR 9494 11, v.11, p. 240-41, Church History Library, Salt Lake City; “Tabernacle Fair,” Ogden Standard, 29 August 1899; “Mrs Stoddard Insane,” Ogden Standard, 2 March 1900; “Ogden Briefs,” Salt Lake Herald, 14 September 1900 [Utah Digital Newspapers]; Utah Death Certificate Index, Utah State Archives.