When Lucy A. Walker was born in Halifax, Yorkshire, England in 1866, she was already a third-generation Latter-day Saint: Her mother Sarah had been baptized in 1848; her father Robert in 1849; and her maternal grandparents, Thomas and Agnes Chalmers, were baptized in 1843.

The family must have shared the same experiences as other converts of that era in England and Scotland – Lucy’s parents even emigrated with a Mormon company a few days after their marriage, arriving in St. Louis in the winter of 1857. Their first child, a son, was born and died there, and the couple returned to England by 1862 without having completed the migration to Utah. No one in the immediate family ever “gathered” – of the couple’s eight children, only Lucy and one brother lived to adulthood.

Whatever the reason for the couple’s return to England, it was not due to any estrangement from the Church: The Millennial Star records acts performed by Thomas Walker as an elder, and when Sarah Walker died in childbirth in 1875, the Star recorded that she had been baptized when eight years old, and that she “died firm in the hope of a glorious resurrection.”

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Lucy, however, was not baptized at age eight, despite her family’s heritage in the Church. That didn’t happen until she was 31 years old, in 1897. Within a few years, she assumed an important role in the Halifax Branch.

Like many European Saints, Lucy longed for the blessings of a temple. She had requested temple work for her brother immediately after his 1902 death, and for her parents after her father’s 1916 death. Lucy had been a leader in her branch Relief Society since 1907, and, as president of that organization for almost 30 years, decided in 1933 that she should take practical steps to build a temple in England.

She reminded the sisters in her branch that “the Salt Lake Temple was built when the people were poor and suffering much hardships. Surely what has been done can be done again,” even in the depths of another time of financial hardship. Lucy provided a sealed box for the sisters to deposit whatever small amounts they could spare. Month after month the fund grew as the women gave what Lucy called “their mites.”

At Christmas time, the box was opened and the coins counted, and the sisters discovered they had accumulated two pounds. Lucy forwarded the amount, together with another pound of her own, to her mission president. The gift arrived almost simultaneously with another donation of five pounds from an elderly sister in another branch, also earmarked for the building of a temple in England. Perplexed, because he knew of no plans to build a local temple, President James H. Douglas consulted the First Presidency, who advised him to use the donations for building meeting houses for the Saints in his mission.

“We appreciate the desire of the saints in England to have a place where they can receive their endowments and do ordinance work for their kindred dead. However there is no thought at the present time of erecting a temple in Europe,” wrote the First Presidency. The time was not ripe. That blessing would not come until 1958, long after Lucy’s 1939 death at age 73.

(Images provided by family members for Lucy’s record at Family Search include this portrait of Lucy taken in about 1884, and a page in the family’s record of ordinances.