As background for some family history writing, I’ve been gathering all the facts I can to fit a story around my ancestors. There is a wealth of information on the Ellsworth Handcart Company of 1856 much of it thanks to the LDS Church History Library’s Overland Travel Database with links to many of the original sources. This is helpful to counter the otherwise frustrating reality that most historians concentrate on the grand success of the first Brigham Young company of pioneers in 1847 or the tragedy of the Willie and Martin handcart companies later and late in 1856. But it just leaves me free to explore and write with a wealth of resources on Ellsworth.

One of those sources has been bothering me. A William Aitken traveled with the McArthur Handcart Company that left just after Ellsworth and was frequently catching up to Ellsworth on the trail. The next year for whatever reasons he had, Aitken left Utah and went back east on the Overland Trail. Aitken published some “exposés” of Mormonism in British Newspapers. He claims to have seen the remains of a fellow traveler from the previous year, Mary Mayo, who was buried at Pacific Springs, the first water west of South Pass. He recorded:

As I passed, her long brown hair were mingled with the tattered garments that covered her poor worn carcass.”

While it’s possible he saw and identified her remains, I don’t find it very plausible unless he had some reason to go looking for her. And remains left exposed would be scattered by wolves or other predators leaving only bones and no “poor worn carcass.” He could also have seen remains of someone in the Willie or Martin Companies as some of the dead were buried in snowbanks because the ground was too hard and the emergency too deep for proper burials. He may have had motive in his disenchantment with Utah and likely the Mormon Church to disparage and exaggerate the tragedies of the trail.

The official account from the Ellsworth Co. indicates that Sister Mayo was buried after they camped on 13 September 1856 at Pacific Springs, “close to the bigg Mountain [Pacific Butte] Left hand side of the road.” The beginnings of the rise to the “bigg Mountain” are some distance away through the sage brush from the “springy grassy” bottoms of Pacific Springs. Hydrology and foliage may have changed some, but the basic geography has not. I believe the burial was a ways off the trail and from the campgrounds “close” to Pacific Butte. There are a couple of draws coming down the slopes with Aspen in them. Those groves may have been different in 1856, but they seems a much more likely spot to me and not far to carry a body for burial.

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Beyond Aitken’s account, Mary Mayo sparked my curiosity. The Overland Travel Database did not have much information listing her only as a widow from England, age 65. My 4th-Great Grandmother, Eleanor Jenkins Vaughan, also with the Ellsworth Company, was an older widow from Wales on the border with England where she was born. I imagine that she and Mary Mayo likely found some common ground on the hundreds of miles of ground they walked and were maybe even companions of some sort.

I went first to Family Search-Family Tree, and there was no more information for Mary Mayo than what was recorded for her with the Ellsworth Company. Then thinking on how we discovered Grandma Eleanor was with the company, I went to the Mormon Migration database maintained by BYU. Pulling up the linked ship’s manifest for the Enoch Train, the same vessel that carried Grandma Eleanor to America, the address given for Mary Mayo was in Ledbury, Herefordshire.

Ledbury is in the same county as Grandma Eleanor’s birthplace. It was also a center of LDS missionary work in eastern Herefordshire, close to John Benbow’s farm and not far from the Gadfield Elm Chapel of the United Brethren in neighboring Gloucestershire. I took some pictures of Ledbury last summer on our trip to Britain with the BYU Welsh professors. There is a unique covered market there where LDS Apostle Wilford Woodruff and others had preached. Unfortunately, my pics were from the van. Someday, we will go back and stop.

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Excited to find Sister Mayo was from Ledbury, I went to Ancestry.com to search the British Census for 1851. There she was in Fownhope, a neighboring parish, as a widow with two daughters! Her occupation was “pauper – Ag. Lab.” No other matches came up. The indexer spelled her last name “Maye,” but on the document it was clearly “Mayo.” While I have not verified absolutely that this is the same Mary Mayo, I feel fairly confidant with the unique name of “Mayo” as “Mary” doesn’t help much.

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The Census also gave me a birthplace in the neighborhood named Sollers Hope. This corner of Herefordshire has some great place names including Pixley, Putley, and Trumpet. And I suppose Much Marcle has more than Little Marcle of whatever marcle is.

I went to the 1841 Census, sadly the first in Britain, and found her with her husband still alive! And with William Mayo’s name and approximate age, I found a marriage to a Mary Taylor in Fownhope with Fawley! I had Sister Mayo’s maiden name! There may be confirmation on the 1841 Census as an 18-year-old woman, Caroline Tyler is in the Mayo household. “Tyler” is close enough to “Taylor” to possibly be a relative of Mary.

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With all of that fitting together, I set up a little Mayo Family Tree on Ancestry.com and transferred it over to Family Search. While temple work had been done for Sister Mayo, I went through all the possible duplicates for her, as well as her husband and daughters and set them up for temple work as well. I found her husbands burial. Two of her sons appeared from an extraction project but the family was not properly linked together which required some forced merging with extraneous ID numbers. And I gave Mary her proper maiden name.

There is no indication that Sister Mayo’s daughters, sons, or a matching Caroline Tyler or Taylor came to Utah. Sister Mayo came alone. The fact that Sister Mayo was listed as a pauper would have helped qualify her as a candidate for the Perpetual Emigration Fund. It also is an indication that she was of the most likely class to have listened to the Mormon Elders, and possibly, the United Brethren before them.

The day after Pioneer Day this year, I was able to take my eldest grandson up to South Pass and we walked down to Pacific Springs and back. I told him about Sister Mayo leaving out the gruesomeness of Aitken’s story. After some thought, he asked me if our Grandma Eleanor, her grandson, daughter, and her daughter’s husband had “made it.” I told him that, yes, they all did.

The wind was blowing down South Pass towards us and there were storms on the horizon. We heard the yip of a coyote and I answered another question with the knowledge that coyotes don’t attack live people, especially if there are two together. We thought we heard other sounds in the wind that could have been people talking up the trail. I explained that wind in desolate places can play tricks on your ears like a visual mirage. Still, there were thousands of people who walked that trail in the old days. A few of them are even buried around there.

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