Researching a Latter-day Saint who immigrated to Utah via rail in the 1800s comes with a unique set of challenges. Learn how to find the information you need here.
The Latter-day Saints who immigrated to Utah from far-flung locales are celebrated for their faith and determination. We sing Primary songs about pioneer children walking the Great Plains, modern-day Saints reenact pulling handcarts, and Pioneer Day is a state-recognized holiday in Utah. Indeed, the image of the trail-hardened pioneer has been memorialized in Latter-day Saint statuary, paintings, and theater. However, not all Saints who moved to Utah camped along dusty trails. Many Latter-day Saints who relocated to Utah arrived after May 10, 1869, when the transcontinental railroad was completed.1,2 These Saints didn’t pull a handcart or drive an ox-drawn wagon; they took the train—and there is great interest in researching their journeys.
Researching information on someone who took the train to Utah comes with unique challenges, as there is often less of a paper trail to uncover. The increased speed with which train riders crossed North America created fewer opportunities to leave records behind. This doesn’t mean that researching a rail-riding Saint is impossible; researchers simply need to be prepared (and a little creative).3
Several of my own ancestors took the train to Utah. In order to highlight the resources available in the Church History Library and elsewhere for researching train-riding Saints, I will describe the research process I undertook to find Ann Hardman. Ann was my rail-riding third-great-grandmother, and her journey is representative of the experience undertaken by many Saints of the era. For the purposes of this post, I will focus specifically on records related to rail journeys, not on every biographical resource in the CHL about Saints from the era.
As always, it’s best to start your research by gathering whatever biographical information you may already have— birthdate, birthplace, marriage date, general date of arrival in Utah (such as a range of years), and (if possible) parents’ names. Since many pioneers have similar names, basic biographical information is a must in order to sift through search results.
The first thing to keep in mind when researching train travel to Utah is that groups are easier to track than individuals. Unlike ships crossing the ocean, railroads did not maintain passenger lists. While the Deseret Evening News would sometimes publish announcements of groups’ arrivals to the Salt Lake Valley, an individual or family arriving to Utah wasn’t big enough news to merit notice in the broadsides. This is especially true for an individual Latter-day Saint—or even an individual family—with enough means to travel to Utah without outside financial assistance. Such individuals would likely generate few records on their journey, and, if they were already living within the United States, the problem only compounds. For example, if they paid for the trip themselves, there would be no loan documents, and without the need to pass through immigration, the only travel documents generated would be train tickets—a small item that may or may not be passed down through the years.
If, however, an individual’s trip was financed by the Perpetual Emigrating Fund, then there may be documentation of the loan and the payments made on it, regardless of whether the immigrant came individually or in a group. The Perpetual Emigrating Fund Research Guide
can help you find such records. (It should be noted, though, that most Saints who received financing for their trip from the PEF came in organized groups.)
Aside from the PEF records, it is always possible to search the Church History Catalog for an individual’s name. Our metadata experts have been adding details to catalog records for years to make a collection’s contents more visible to a search. Perhaps your individual’s name will appear.
With a group—especially one that originates outside of the United States—there are more possibilities for research. Thus, interestingly, if you want to research a rail journey, sometimes it is best to start by searching Saints’ ocean voyages to establish in which group your individual may have traveled. Fortunately, my grandmother falls into this category. While her trip was not (as best as I can determine) financed by the Perpetual Emigrating Fund, I knew that she traveled from England, and I suspected it may have been with a group of fellow Latter-day Saints. That’s why I searched the Saints by Sea database at Brigham Young University, which contains lists of Saints who sailed to various United States ports en route to Utah. A search for “Ann Hardman” revealed two Anns that traveled from Liverpool to New York City. My grandmother was easy to identify, because I knew from family history that she was only 17 at the time of her trip. Her company of 165 Saints traveled aboard the steamship Arizona, which left Liverpool on November 1, 1884, and arrived in New York City on November 11, 1884—quite the speedy improvement over the days of sailing ships!
The Arizona, which carried my grandmother’s company of Saints from Liverpool to New York City.
The search also revealed a key piece of information: her group of Saints was led by a returning missionary named J. Alma Smith. The group’s secretary was another missionary named George Goddard. I could search for both of these names in the Church History Catalog, since searching for my grandmother’s name didn’t return any results.
Searching the Church History Catalog for George Goddard reveals that the CHL holds his personal papers, including journals he kept during his trip to and from England. His journal entries from the Arizona’s trip across the Atlantic tell a lively story, including that the ship faced a severe storm that made most of the Saints violently seasick. (The storm was so intense that a crew member was struck by a rogue wave and thrown across the deck, resulting in a broken leg, arm, and rib. The Saints donated money toward his medical treatment.) His journal continues after the group’s arrival in New York City, and I discovered that they arrived in Ogden, Utah, on November 18, 1884.
A catalog search for J. Alma Smith yielded results, as well: two telegrams sent to John Taylor from rail stations (Chicago and Omaha) along the route westward. If I hadn’t found Goddard’s journal (or if he simply hadn’t written one), these telegrams would have been crucial in establishing the progress my grandmother’s group made crossing North America. Even if I hadn’t previously discovered the date of the group’s arrival in Ogden, I could have used these telegrams to estimate their ETA. There is also an entry for Smith in the Church History Biographical Database which lists the mission that he was returning from when he captained my grandmother’s company. Again, if I hadn’t already found Goddard’s journal in the catalog, I could use Smith’s missionary release date to determine when the group reached Salt Lake City.
The Millennial Star often published accounts of Saints’ journeys to Utah, and Saints by Sea indicated that my grandmother’s group had been profiled several times. Thus, I was able to use the CHL’s list of Church magazines and newspapers to find digitized volumes of The Millennial Star in the Church History Catalog that contained these travelogues. The articles, by and large, were condensed versions of Goddard’s journal entries, but they also contained an interesting tidbit. Apparently, upon arrival in New York City, a member of my grandmother’s group—a young woman—decided that she didn’t want to continue to Utah. (Her family had been baptized members of the Church, but she had not, and she apparently didn’t share her family’s motivation to gather to Zion.) The press seized upon the incident, using it to assert that the Saints were kidnapping young women and attempting to forcibly take them to Utah. The media also accused the Saints of drunkenness, gambling, and other indiscretions while aboard the Arizona. Accordingly, the company leaders had the ship’s commander write a sworn statement that the Latter-day Saints had behaved themselves on board.
As mentioned above, the Deseret Evening News sometimes published lists of arriving Saints, provided they came in a group large enough to merit mentioning. Utah Digital Newspapers (hosted at the University of Utah) has digitized copies of the Deseret Evening News, the preeminent Salt Lake City newspaper of the day, and the website’s search function has text recognition. Searching for “Ann Hardman” gave me an article published on November 15, 1884, that announced her group’s departure from Liverpool, even breaking down the passengers by their ultimate destination. (If I hadn’t have already known she was going to Ogden, this would have greatly helped.)
After my grandmother’s group arrived in Ogden on November 18, 1884, many of the immigrants would continue south to Salt Lake City. My grandmother remained in the greater Ogden area, where she would spend the rest of her life. Based on my family’s records, I knew that she married my grandfather a month later on December 18 in the Logan Utah Temple. (Per family lore, it was something of an arranged marriage, hence their speedy engagement.) I can only imagine the whirlwind of emotions she felt as she tried to acclimate herself to a new country with a new husband in such a short timeframe.
If I were to research another of my ancestors who rode their way to Utah, I’d try to follow a similar methodology:
1. Assemble whatever biographical data is already available.
2. Determine whether the person traveled as an individual or with a group.
3. If the person is coming from outside the United States, check Saints by Sea
. If there’s a match, use the information (the name of company leaders, for example, or the name of the ship) for searches in the Church History Catalog
that may have listed the individual. Researching my train-riding ancestor was a wonderful exploration of the Church History Library’s resources, and I’m grateful for the opportunity it provided me to get to know my grandmother better. I hope that the resources listed herein can help you find train-riding Saints, too. They deserve to be found!
Have you used Church History Library resources to research someone’s biographical information? We would love to hear about it. Please tell us about your research process at CHLBlog@ChurchofJesusChrist.org.
Top image: Unidentified passengers on the Union Pacific Railroad near Ogden, Utah, circa 1870 (PH 7383).
Notes
1. The main period of Latter-day Saint pioneer overland travel (i.e., travel to Utah via wagon or handcart) is roughly defined as lasting from 1847 to 1868. For more information and statistics regarding the pioneer migration to Utah, see “ Latter-day Saint Pioneer Emigration Facts .”
2. It should be noted that, prior to 1869, there were many Latter-day Saints who took the railroad as it was still being built; they would travel via rail as far as it would go—St. Louis, for example, or, later, Omaha—and then travel the rest of the way to Utah by wagon or foot.
3. I thank Emily Marie Crumpton-Deason for the research assistance she provided, without which this article would not have been written.
In his previous post, archivist Jay Burrup detailed Franklin K. Shedd’s journey to the Salt Lake Valley. Here, in the final chapter of a three-part series, read what became of Franklin as he made a life on the frontier
