Finding My Ancestors: Frances Long (1803-1885) 52 Ancestors #3

Frances Long (1803-1885)

My fourth great grandmother, Frances Long was born September 5, 1803 in Fauls Green, Shropshire, England to Able Long and Elizabeth Ridgeway. Frances is the only child I know of from these parents. At the age of 24 Frances married William Reeves and five children were born of this union in England: Elizabeth, Samuel, Josiah, Sarah, and Frances. According to a history published in Pioneer Women of Faith and Fortitude (p. 3339), her second son (Samuel) was killed in England after he was gored by a pig (presumably as a child).

In 1842, Frances, William, her children and her mother, Elizabeth Ridgeway were converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and baptized. After joining the church, the Reeves family was among the first English converts to come to America in 1843 to be with the main body of the Latter-Day Saints. They lived on a farm a short distance from Nauvoo, Illinois. Frances Reeves (daughter of Frances Long) told her son (Lewis Albert Willis) about walking to Nauvoo to hear the Prophet Joseph Smith speak. Although she was very young at the time (only about 4 years old), she remembered walking to Nauvoo with her father. Young Frances would cry and beg her father to carry her, but he was ill with consumption and was not strong enough, so he would go ahead and hide in the tall grass and play hide and seek with her until they arrived at Nauvoo.

William Reeves continued to suffer from poor health in Illinois and died at the age of 42 in 1845, leaving Frances a widow with small children. Her mother, Elizabeth Ridgeway, also passed away the same year, within days of her husband's passing.

To make matters worse, the Latter Day Saints were driven from Nauvoo in 1846. About this time, Frances is said to have married John Sweat, a widower with 5 sons, but I have found no documented evidence of this. But John Sweat also got ill with cholera and passed away on the trek west to the Great Salt Lake Valley. Frances and her daughter, Sarah (my ancestor) also had smallpox on the trek to the Salt Lake Valley, but both recovered from their illness.

According to the Mormon Pioneer Overland Travel Database, Frances and her younger children arrived in the Salt Lake Valley in 1850, and she may have traveled with the William Snow/Joseph Young Company with her married daughter, Elizabeth Reeves Pollock.

In April 1851, Frances became the wife of William Wessley Willis, a veteran lieutenant of the Mormon Battalion, who was also recently widowed. In addition to being a mother for her own children, Frances was a mother to the children of her other widowed husbands.

The Willis family moved to Provo, Spanish Fork, and then Cedar City, and Beaver. In 1861, William Willis was also sent to settle Muddy River southwest of St. George, but after raising two crops there, the settlement was abandoned and William returned to Beaver, where he died in 1872.

After her third husband's death, Frances spent her last years with her children and their families in Toquerville and Kanarra (name changed to Kanarraville in 1934). She passed away at the age of 82 on December 10, 1885 in Kanarra, Utah and is buried in the Kanarraville cemetery.

I made a trip to Southern Utah last week and attempted to locate the gravestone for Frances Long. There were several old sandstone headstones that the engravings had long since worn off, but I did find the grave sites for two of her children, Josiah Reeves and Elizabeth Reeves Pollock. Below are some of the pictures I took at the cemetery.